What is Data Mining?

Data Mining is a method to apply math to large datasets and find useful or interesting trends. Think of looking for “known unknown trends” (trends that you want to understand but have not solved for) and “unknown unknown trends” (trends that you did not know to look for). Data Mining can occur on top of BI and Big Data systems or any other ordinary database. The magic is in the ability to identify things that go up or down together across datasets that are simply too large for humans to sort through. It’s powerful stuff (especially for geeks like me).