Through Analysis Part of the Cornell Database Group .
Data mining is the process of discovering useful patterns in large data sets.
These patterns help us to understand the data better so that database users can make good predictions of future trends and to help guide users in decision making. Data mining is a combination of many academic fields including computer science, statistics, behavioral studies, human computer interaction, and computer engineering. Before users can apply data mining algorithms, the data set must be prepared for analysis. Choosing which data attributes should be used for processing and which attributes can be ignored is an important first step to reduce the magnitude of computation. Once this preprocessing is complete, users are free to apply one or many of the data mining techniques depending on the application and user needs.