"Data Mining (DM)"
Data Mining (DM), also known as Knowledge Discovery, is the process of automatically searching large volumes of data for patterns that may be used to predict future behavior. An everyday example of Data Mining is its use in retail sales. If a store tracks the purchases of a customer and notices that a customer buys a lot of golf shirts, the Data Mining system will make a correlation between that customer and golf shirts. In this case, the Data Mining system used by the retail store discovered new information about the customer that was previously unknown to the company. This application of Data Mining is often called Market Basket Analysis.
The term is commonly misused to describe software that presents data in new ways. True data mining software doesn’t just change the presentation, but actually discovers previously unknown relationships among the data. Data mining is popular in the science and mathematical fields but also is utilized increasingly by marketers trying to distill useful consumer data from Web sites.
More Information
For more information about Data Mining, consult the WikiPedia article on the subject(WikiPedia article about Data Mining