Data mining involves sorting through data to discover patterns and establish relationships. Data mining helps provide recommendations to improve business processes. Data mining also aids to predict future trends to help businesses make proactive and informed decisions to answer questions.
There are several types of analysis that can be incorporated to retrieve information from big data. Different data mining strategies provide different results. The data mining technique an organization should use relies on the business problem or objective it is trying to solve. The most important objective of any data mining process is to uncover useful information that is easily understood in large data sets.
Common data mining techniques include:
Clustering – identifies data sets that are similar to each other to understand differences and similarities within the data. Clusters have certain traits in common that can be used to improve targeting algorithms.
Classification – obtains important and relevant information about data and metadata – data about data. The classification analysis helps identify which set of categories different types of data belong.
Association Rule – enables the discovery of interesting relations between different variables in large databases. It uncovers hidden patterns in the data that can be used to identify variables within the data and the co-occurrences of different variables that appear with the greatest frequencies.
Anomaly Detection – refers to the search for data items in a dataset that do not match a projected pattern or expected behavior.
Regression Analysis – attempts to define the dependency between variables. It assumes a one-way causal effect from one variable to the response of another variable.
Summarization – provides a more compact representation of the data set, including visualization and report generation.
Data mining helps organizations get the necessary information needed to handle different processes as quickly as possible as well as obtain information to differentiate itself from its competition.