Data Mining is an analytic process designed to explore data (usually large amounts of data – typically business or market related – also known as “big data”) in search of consistent patterns and/or systematic relationships between variables, and then to validate the findings by applying the detected patterns to new subsets of data. The ultimate goal of data mining is prediction – and predictive data mining is the most common type of data mining and one that has the most direct business applications.
Process of Data Mining
The process of data mining consists of three stages:
(1) the initial exploration,
(2) model building or pattern identification with validation/verification,
(3) deployment (i.e., the application of the model to new data in order to generate predictions).