Data Mining in Practice

Abstract

There is an explosion in the amount of data that organizations generate, collect, and store. Organizations are gradually relying more on new technologies to access, analyze, summarize, and interpret information intelligently and automatically. Data mining, therefore, has become a research area with increased importance (Amaratunga & Cabrera, 2004). Data mining is the search for valuable information in large volumes of data (Hand, Mannila, & Smyth, 2001). It can discover hidden relationships, patterns, and interdependencies, and generate rules to predict the correlations, which can help the organizations make critical decisions faster or with a greater degree of confidence (Gargano & Raggad, 1999).