“The process of analyzing data from different perspectives and summarizing it into useful information — information that can be used to increase revenue, cut costs or both.”
The growing power and sophistication of computers and software has played a big role in the evolution of data mining in recent years. New software tools enable businesses to gather critical data from all areas of the company and then categorize, analyze and summarize it. Data mining also enables companies to find correlations and patterns among different fields of data in large databases and make connections between seemingly unconnected pieces of information that can lead to new business insights.