DATAMINING & DATAWAREHOUSING

1. DATA MINING
1.1 INTRODUCTION TO DATA MINING
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.




Figure 1: The Growing Base of Data
Data storage became easier as the availability of large amounts of computing power at low cost i.e., 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...