ABSTRACT
Data mining, sometimes called data discovery or knowledge discovery, is the process of analyzing data from different perspectives and summarizing them into useful information. On a more technical level, data mining is the process of finding correlations or patterns among many fields in large relational databases. There are several types of analytical software systems currently available for use in the criminal justice system. Chapter 9 describes some types of analytical software, including the Statistical Analysis System (SAS), a software suite that can mine, alter, manage, and retrieve data from a variety of sources and perform statistical analysis on them; and machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that provides computers with the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. Machine learning programs detect patterns in data and adjust program actions accordingly. The difference between machine learning and data mining is that machine learning focuses on prediction, while data mining focuses on the discovery of (previously) unknown properties in the data.
