A View on Data Mining

Abstract: Data mining, or knowledge discovery, is the computer-assisted process of analyzing voluminous sets of data and then discovering the meaning of the data. Data Warehouse is a subject-oriented, time variant, integrated, non volatile collection of data to assist management in the decision making process Data mining tools predict behaviours and future trends, allowing businesses to make proactive, knowledge-driven decisions. Data mining tools can answer business questions that traditionally were very time consuming to resolve. They evaluate databases for hidden patterns, finding predictive information that experts may miss because it lies outside their expectations. This paper also shows the architecture of data mining system. Generally, Data mining tasks can be classified into two main categories namely descriptive and predictive. Descriptive Mining tasks characterize the general properties of data in the database while Predictive Mining tasks inference on the current data to make predictions. Class Description and Associations are the activities under descriptive mining and Regression and cluster analysis are the tasks under predictive mining. Data mining systems must be able to discover patterns at various levels of abstraction. Data mining systems also facilitates users to provide certain hints to guide the search for required patterns.

Keywords: Data Mining, Data Warehousing, Knowledge Discovery in databases, cluster analysis, class description.