Microsoft Data Mining: Integrated Business Intelligence for e-Commerce and Knowledge Management (Repost)

Data mining exploits the knowledge that is held in the enterprise data store by examining the data to reveal patterns that suggest better ways to produce profit, savings, higher-quality products, and greater customer satisfaction. Just as the lines on our faces reveal a history of laughter and frowns, the patterns embedded in data reveal a history of, for example, profits and losses. The retrieval of these patterns from data and the implementation of the lessons learned from the patterns are what data mining and knowledge discovery are all about.