What is Data Mining ? Briefly discuss the categories of Data Mining techniques.

Data Mining: It is a process of extracting hidden information from large databases. It is a powerful new technology to help companies focus on the important information in their data warehouses. Data mining tools may predict future trends and behaviors, allowing businesses to make proactive, knowledge-driven decisions. For a commercial business, the discovery of previously unknown statistical patterns or trends can provide valuable insight into the function and environment of their organization. Data mining techniques can generally be grouped into two categories: Predictive Method and Descriptive Method. Predictive Method: In this method, we can use some variables to predict unknown or future values of other variable. It is used to predict whether a newly arrived customer will spend more than ₹ 1000 at a department store. Descriptive Method: It is a method of finding human interpretable patterns that describe the data. Data mining in this case is useful to group together similar documents returned by search engine according to their context.