Data mining treat as a synonym for another popularly used term, Knowledge Discovery from Data, or KDD. In others view data mining as simply an essential step in the process of knowledge discovery, in which intelligent methods are applied in order to extract data patterns.
Knowledge discovery from data consists of the following steps:
- Data cleaning (to remove noise or irrelevant data).
- Data integration (where multiple data sources may be combined).
- Data selection (where data relevant to the analysis task are retrieved from the database).
- Data transformation (where data are transmuted or consolidated into forms appropriate for mining by performing summary or aggregation functions, for sample).
- Data mining (an important process where intelligent methods are applied in order to extract data patterns).
- Pattern evaluation (to identify the fascinating patterns representing knowledge based on some interestingness measures).
- Knowledge presentation (where knowledge representation and visualization techniques are used to present the mined knowledge to the user).
