Future Prospects for Neural Networks 3.4.2. The goal of data mining, as illustrated in the picture below, is to discover knowledge out of data and present it in a form that is easily comprehensible to humans. The data mining toolbox includes techniques such as machine learning, statistics, neural networks and visualization methods.
Neural networks form just part of the data miner's toolbox.
They are well suited to identify trends and patterns in the data and are therefore mainly used for prediction and forecasting needs. Examples are sales forecasting, industrial process control, customer research, data validation, risk management, and target marketing. Many standard software packages for data mining contain neural network modules. They often fail to fulfil the important requirement of providing insight in the database. In fact, one could even argue whether these standard neural networks are truly methods for data mining as defined above, or at most classification, predictions and perhaps clustering tools.