Data mining helps users find hidden patterns and useful business information in large data sets. Corporations can use these patterns and rules to improve their marketing, sales, and customer-support operations by better understanding their customers. These patterns can help solve many business problems, such as figuring out which customers are most likely to leave or discovering what other products certain customers are most likely to be interested in. In these scenarios, the key activities are discovering inherent (but not always obvious) patterns in the data and then, based on the patterns, making predictions.

In ...