What is 'Data Mining' and why is it important?

Data mining identifies trends within data that go beyond simple analysis. Through the use of sophisticated algorithms, users have the ability to identify key attributes of business processes and target opportunities.

The term "data mining" is often used to apply to the two separate processes of knowledge discovery and prediction. Knowledge discovery provides explicit information that has a readable form and can be understood by a user. Forecasting, or predictive modeling provides predictions of future events and may be transparent and readable in some approaches (e.g. rule based systems) and opaque in others such as neural networks. Moreover, some data mining systems such as neural networks are inherently geared towards prediction and pattern recognition, rather than knowledge discovery.