What is data mining?

According to Satinder Singh Madhok in the modern world of ever increasing technology and research, there has been a lot of talking and discussion going on about data. You all must have been part of some conversations around in your office or if you like to read content, you are definitely a part of this revolution which data has brought. 

So first of all lets try to understand what data in its most general terms means and then we will look into a even greater part of it which is referred to data mining. Satinder Madhok says, data is anything which has some facts and figures. In a small world, you can anything a data or a part of data. 

For instance a piece of writing is data, any object has some specific attributes which defines it is data, your shopping list is data. Similarly anything which contains some information about something can be called as data.

Everyday a huge quantity of data is produced around the world. If you take internet as the means to access data, certainly there is an infinite data present about any tiny thing on the internet which you aspire to get. Now you have clarity about one thing that data is present everywhere but now the second step to dig out is what is the use of this enormous data and how can be access it efficiently.

Let us try to understand this with a very small example. You all do a lot of online shopping over online marketing websites like Flipkart or Amazon. Now suppose there is a festive season and you are looking for some nice traditional dresses of red colour. In the website of Amazon, there is a pretty huge collection of outfits present. 

How do you exclusively pick out what you want? So here is the thing. There is an option to search and filter out your kind of choice. First of all, you will go into the traditional dresses section. Then as you want something of red colour, you will filter out selective dresses which are in the colour of your choice. 

                                                                                                                 

Now you may have some budget in mind and then you can order something which you like and which is in your budget. So this whole process of selection is what we call as data mining. This is like taking out the useful data from a huge chunk of data. You can compare it like digging of gold from the earth. 

There are many things which the earth contains but the miners take out the most precious gold and leave the rest as it is. Data is also the same thing. There is a lot present on the web but you need to pick the one which has got importance to you by mining the data.

There is proper mechanism according to which the entire process of data mining works. There are different algorithms written which works on the background to help retrieve the most useful piece of relevant information the user is searching to get. 

There is a knowledge base which keeps on getting updated for the set of data which is requested actively. If the data which the user is searching for is present already in the knowledge base , he will be able to retrieve it quickly. 

There are data warehouses which are maintained for all kinds of data in groups. All of this helps for fast retrieval and access of data to make the mining of data more proficient and easy. This world is moving towards analytics and data mining is certainly the core of it.