What is Data Mining?

According to the Gartner Group, Data mining is the process of discoveringmeaningful new correlations, patterns and trends by sifting through large amounts ofdata stored in repositories, using pattern recognition technologies as well as statisticaland mathematical techniques.
Other definitions:

• Data mining is the analysis of (often large) observational data sets to findunsuspected relationships and to summarize the data in novel ways that areboth understandable and useful to the data owner. (David Hand, Heikki Mannila, and Padhraic Smyth, Principles of Data Mining, MIT Press,Cambridge, MA, 2001.)
• Data mining is an interdisciplinary field bringing togther techniques frommachine learning, pattern recognition, statistics, databases, and visualization toaddress the issue of information extraction from large data bases. (Peter Cabena, Pablo Hadjinian, Rolf Stadler, JaapVerhees, and Alessandro Zanasi, DiscoveringData Mining: From Concept to Implementation, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River,NJ, 1998.)