May 21, 2013
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Description
Data mining, an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science, is the computational process of discovering patterns in large data sets involving methods at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics, and database systems. The overall goal of the data mining process is to extract information from a data set and transform it into an understandable structure for further use. Aside from the raw analysis step, it involves database and data management aspects, data preprocessing, model and inference considerations, interestingness metrics, complexity considerations, post-processing of discovered structures, visualization, and online updating.
The term is a buzzword, and is frequently misused to mean any form of large-scale data or information processing but is also generalized to any kind of computer decision support system, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, and business intelligence. In the proper use of the word, the key term is discovery, commonly defined as "detecting something new". Even the popular book "Data mining: Practical machine learning tools and techniques with Java" was originally to be named just "Practical machine learning", and the term "data mining" was only added for marketing reasons. Often the more general terms " data analysis", or "analytics" – or when referring to actual methods, artificial intelligence and machine learning – are more appropriate.
(via Freebase)
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