ABSTRACT
The dissemination of information systems in organizations and technological progress in terms of computational power, communications technology, and storage capability has the side effect of producing repositories with huge amounts of data. Databases — as these repositories are called — have grown in number and size and it quickly became apparent that all the stored information constituted a valuable resource, especially if reliable methods could be found to recover useful information — knowledge — from the raw data in storage. A completely new interdisciplinary field has grown around this general goal and is now known as Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD). As a broadly accepted definition, we can say that KDD is a complex process that aims to extract implicit, previously unknown, and potentially useful information from data, in a nontrivial way.
