Data Mining Fundamental Concepts and Critical Issues

Data mining is the process of extracting previously unknown information from large databases or data warehouses and using it to make crucial business decisions. Data mining tools find patterns in the data and infer rules from them. The extracted information can be used to form a prediction or classification model, identify relations between database records, or provide a summary of the databases being mined. Those patterns and rules can be used to guide decision making and forecast the effect of those decisions, and data mining can speed analysis by focusing attention on the most important variables.