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DATA MINING AND DATA WAREHOUSING



INTRODUCTION :

In the modern world of computing it is very essential to compute and transfer different kinds of data across the globe. In this extract we shall now see some of the major concepts behind DATA MINING AND DATA WAREHOUSING. The past two decades has seen a dramatic increase in the amount of information or data being stored in electronic format. This accumulation of data has taken place at an explosive rate. It has been estimated that the amount of information in the world doubles every 20 months and the size and number of databases are increasing even faster. The increase in use of electronic data gathering devices such as point-of-sale or remote sensing devices has contributed to this explosion of available data. Figure 1 from the Red Brick company illustrates the data explosion.
Data storage became easier as the availability of large amounts of computing power at low cost ie the cost of processing power and storage is falling, made data cheap. There was also the introduction of new machine learning methods for knowledge representation based on logic programming etc. in addition to traditional statistical analysis of data. The new methods tend to be computationally intensive hence a demand for more processing power.
WHAT IS DATA MINING ?
The term data mining has been stretched beyond its limits to apply to any form of data analysis. Some of the numerous definitions of Data Mining, or Knowledge Discovery in Databases are:Data mining is the search for relationships and global patterns that exist in large databases but are `hidden' among the vast amount of data, such as a relationship between patient data and their medical diagnosis. These relationships represent valuable knowledge about the database and the objects in the database and, if the database is a faithful mirror, of the real world registered by the database.
The analogy with the mining...