Data mining is the process of automatically discovering useful information in large data
repositories.
Data mining techniques are deployed to scour large databases in order to find novel and useful
patterns that might otherwise remain unknown.
They also provide capabilities to predict the outcome of a future observation, such as predicting
whether a newly arrived customer will spend more than $100 at a department store.
Not all information discovery tasks are considered to be data mining. For example, looking up
individual records using a database management system or finding particular Web pages via a query
to an Internet search engine are tasks related to the area of Information Retrieval.
