What is Data Mining? What Kinds of Data can be Mined?

Data mining is also known as Knowledge Discovery from Data, or KDD for short, which turns a large collection of data into knowledge. Data mining is a multidisciplinary field including machine learning, artificial intelligence, pattern recognition, knowledge-based systems, high-performance computing, database technology, and data visualization. 

• Data mining is the process of analyzing data from different perspectives and summarizing it into useful information. 
• Data mining is the process of finding hidden information and patterns in a huge database. 
• Data mining is the extraction of implicit, previously unknown, and potentially useful information from data.

 

Data, Information, and Knowledge
Data: Data are any recorded facts, numbers, or text that can be processed by a computer - scientific data, medical data, demographic data, financial data, and marking data.

Information: The patterns, associations, or relationships among all this data can provide information.

Knowledge: Information can be converted into knowledge about historical patterns and future trends.

 

What Kinds of Data can be Mined?
The most basic forms of data for mining are come from: 

1. Database Data 
2. Data Warehouses 
3. Transactional Data