From Patterns in Data to Knowledge Discovery: What Data Mining Can Do

Data mining is defined as the computational process of analyzing large amounts of data in order to extract patterns and useful information. In the last few decades, data mining has been widely recognized as a powerful yet versatile data-analysis tool in a variety of fields: information technology in primis, but also clinical medicine, sociology, physics.In this technical note we provide a high-level overview of the most prominent tasks and methods that form the basis of data mining. The note also focuses on some of the most recent yet promising interdisciplinary aspects of data mining.