5.2 Data Mining Concepts and Application
A large component of this understanding comes from analyzing the vast amount of data that a company collects.
The cost of storing and processing data has decreased dramatically in the recent past, and, as a result, the amount of data stored in electronic form has grown at an explosive rate.
With the creation of large databases, the possibility of analyzing the data stored in them has emerged.
The term data mining was originally used to describe the process through which previously unknown patterns in data were discovered.
This definition has since been stretched beyond those limits by some software vendors to include most forms of data analysis in order to increase sales with the popularity of the data mining label.