On the commercial side, perhaps the most common use of data mining has been in the finance, retail, and health care sectors.
Data mining is used
to detect and reduce fraudulent activities, especially in insurance claims and credit card use (Chan et al., 1999);
to identify customer buying patterns (Hoffman, 1999);
to reclaim profitable customers(Hoffman, 1998);
to identify trading rules from historical data; and to aid in increased profitability using market-basket analysis.
Data mining is already widely used to better target clients, and with the widespread development of e-commerce, this can only become more imperative with time.