What are Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery?
With the enormous amount of data stored in files, databases, and other repositories, it is increasingly important, if not necessary, to develop powerful means for analysis and perhaps interpretation of such data and for the extraction of interesting knowledge that could help in decision-making. Data Mining, also popularly known as Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD), refers to the nontrivial extraction of implicit, previously unknown and potentially useful information from data in databases. While data mining and knowledge discovery in databases (or KDD) are frequently treated as synonyms, data mining is actually part of the knowledge discovery process. The following figure (Figure 1.1) shows data mining as a step in an iterative knowledge discovery process. The Knowledge Discovery in Databases process comprises of a few steps leading from raw data collections to some form of new knowledge. The iterative process consists of the following steps: • Data cleaning: also known as data cl
