
However, while it can be used to uncover hidden patterns in data that has been collected, obviously it can neither uncover patterns which are not already present in the data, nor can it uncover patterns in data that has not been collected. Data mining can be applied to data sets of any size.

It is commonly used in a wide range of applications, such as marketing, fraud detection and scientific discovery. As more data is gathered, with the amount of data doubling every three years, data mining is becoming an increasingly important tool to transform this data into information. This activity was formerly known in the statistical community as data mining, but that term is now in widespread use with an essentially positive meaning, so the pejorative term data dredging is now used instead.ĭata mining is the process of extracting hidden patterns from data. Data dredging (data fishing, data snooping) is the inappropriate (sometimes deliberately so) search for 'statistically significant' relationships in large quantities of data.
