Data mining is the process of extracting patterns from data. As more data are gathered, with the amount of data doubling every three years, data mining is becoming an increasingly important tool to transform these data into information. It is commonly used in a wide range of profiling practices, such as marketing, surveillance, fraud detection and scientific discovery.
While data mining can be used to uncover patterns in data samples, it is impor...
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Data mining is the process of extracting patterns from data. As more data are gathered, with the amount of data doubling every three years, data mining is becoming an increasingly important tool to transform these data into information. It is commonly used in a wide range of profiling practices, such as marketing, surveillance, fraud detection and scientific discovery.
While data mining can be used to uncover patterns in data samples, it is important to be aware that the use of non-representative samples of data may produce results that are not indicative of the domain. Similarly, data mining will not find patterns that may be present in the domain, if those patterns are not present in the sample being "mined". There is a tendency for insufficiently knowledgeable "consumers" of the results to attribute "magical abilities" to data mining, treating the technique as a sort of all-seeing crystal ball. Like any other tool, it only functions in conjunction with the appropriate raw material:...
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