Data Mining

What Is Data Mining?

Data mining is a process used by companies to turn raw data into useful information. By using software to look for patterns in large batches of data, businesses can learn more about their customers to develop more effective marketing strategies, increase sales and decrease costs.

Data mining depends on effective data collection, warehousing, and computer processing.

How Data Mining Works

Data mining involves exploring and analyzing large blocks of information to glean meaningful patterns and trends. It can be used in a variety of ways, such as database marketing, credit risk management, fraud detection, spam Email filtering, or even to discern the sentiment or opinion of users.

The data mining process breaks down into five steps. First, organizations collect data and load it into their data warehouses. Next, they store and manage the data, either on in-house servers or the cloud. Business analysts, management teams, and information technology professionals access the data and determine how they want to organize it. Then, application software sorts the data based on the user's results, and finally, the end-user presents the data in an easy-to-share format, such as a graph or table.

Data Warehousing and Mining Software

Data mining programs analyze relationships and patterns in data based on what users request. For example, a company can use data mining software to create classes of information. To illustrate, imagine a restaurant wants to use data mining to determine when it should offer certain specials. It looks at the information it has collected and creates classes based on when customers visit and what they order.

In other cases, data miners find clusters of information based on logical relationships or look at associations and sequential patterns to draw conclusions about trends in consumer behavior.

Warehousing is an important aspect of data mining. Warehousing is when companies centralize their data into one database or program. With a data warehouse, an organization may spin off segments of the data for specific users to analyze and use.

However, in other cases, analysts may start with the data they want and create a data warehouse based on those specs. Regardless of how businesses and other entities organize their data, they use it to support management's decision-making processes.

Data Mining and Social Media

One of the most lucrative applications of data mining has been that of social media. Platforms like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter gather reams of data about individual users to make inferences about their preferences in order to send targeted marketing ads. This data is also used to try to influence user behavior and change their preferences, whether it be for a consumer product or who they will vote for in an election.

Data mining on social media has become a big point of contention, with several investigative reports and exposes showing just how nefarious mining users' data can be.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal is a prime example of how social media companies can use data mining at the expense of their users.

Example of Data Mining

Grocery stores are well-known users of data mining techniques. Many supermarkets offer free loyalty cards to customers that give them access to reduced prices not available to non-members. The cards make it easy for stores to track who is buying what, when they are buying it, and at what price. After analyzing the data, stores can then use this data to offer customers coupons targeted to their buying habits and decide when to put items on sale or when to sell them at full price.

Data mining can be a cause for concern when a company uses only selected information, which is not representative of the overall sample group, to prove a certain hypothesis.

Data mining processes are used to build machine learning models that power applications including search engine technology and website recommendation programs.

How is data mining done?

Data mining relies on big data and advanced computing processes including machine learning and other forms of artificial intelligence (AI). The goal is to find patterns that can lead to inferences or predictions from otherwise unstructured or large data sets.

What is another term for data mining?

Data mining also goes by the less-used term knowledge discover in data, or KDD.

Who uses data mining?

Data mining applications range from the financial sector to look for patterns in the markets to governments trying to identify potential security threats. Corporations, and especially online and social media companies, use data mining on their users to create profitable advertising and marketing campaigns that target specific sets of users.