ABSTRACT
While we feel that data is important, if not for the other supporting data mining technologies we would not have data mining either. So this chapter provides a brief introduction to these other technologies and discusses how they support data mining. Notable among these technologies are statistical methods and machine learning. Statistical methods have resulted in various statistical packages to compute sums, averages, and distributions. These packages are now being integrated with databases for mining. Machine learning is all about learning rules and patterns from the data. One needs some amount of statistics to carry out machine learning. While statistical methods and machine learning are the two key components to data mining apart from data management, there are also some other technologies. These include visualization, parallel processing, and decision support. Visualization techniques help visualize the data so that data mining is facilitated. Parallel processing techniques help improve the performance of data mining. Decision support systems help prune the results and give the essential results to carry out management functions.
