Using Data Mining for Business Intelligence
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Business intelligence is information about a company's past performance that is used to help predict the company's future performance. It can reveal emerging trends from which the company might profit. Data mining allows users to sift through the enormous amount of information available in data warehouses; it is from this sifting process that business intelligence gems may be found. Jagadish Chatterjee explains the process, and describes how Microsoft SQL Server can help.
NOTE: This article is completely dedicated to the persons who requested an article on data mining, when my previous article “Planning a Data Warehouse” was published. This is a complete introductory article on how to extend our data warehouse's implementation to benefit business intelligence using data Mining.
Data mining is the process of extracting hidden knowledge from large volumes of raw data. It can also be defined as the process of extracting hidden predictive information from large databases.
Data mining is not an “intelligence” tool or framework. Business intelligence, typically drawn from an enterprise data warehouse, is used to analyze and uncover information about past performance on an aggregate level. Data warehousing and business intelligence provide a method for users to anticipate future trends from analyzing past patterns in organizational data. Data mining is more intuitive, allowing for increased insight beyond data warehousing. An implementation of data mining in an organization will serve as a guide to uncovering inherent trends and tendencies in historical information. It will also allow for statistical predictions, groupings and classifications of data.
Most companies collect, refine and deduce massive quantities of data. Data mining techniques can be implemented rapidly on existing software and hardware platforms to enhance the value of existing information resources, and can be integrated with new products and systems as they become part of the system. When implemented on high performance client/server or parallel processing computers, data mining tools can analyze massive databases to deliver answers to many different types of predictive questions.
Data mining software allows users to analyze large databases to solve business decision-making problems. Data mining tools predict future trends and behaviors, allowing businesses to make proactive, knowledge-driven decisions. Data mining tools can answer business questions that traditionally were too time-consuming to resolve. Data mining is, in some ways, an extension of statistics, with a few artificial intelligence and machine learning twists thrown in. Like statistics, data mining is not a business solution, it is just a technology.
Next: When did data mining begin? >>
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