ABSTRACT
In general, data mining is understood as the practice of automatically searching large stores of data for patterns. Nowadays, incredibly large (and quickly growing) amounts of data are collected in commercial, administrative, and scientific databases. Several sciences (e.g., molecular biology, genetics, astrophysics, and many others) produce extreme amounts of information which are often collected automatically. This is why it is impossible to analyze and exploit all these data manually; what we need are intelligent computer systems that can extract useful information (such as general rules or interesting patterns) from large amounts of observations. In short, “data mining is the non-trivial process of identifying valid, novel, potentially useful, and ultimately understandable patterns in data” [FPSS96].
