data mining

n.The process of identifying previously unknown patterns by analyzing relationships in large amounts of data assembled from different applications.

Citations

Illingworth 1996, p. 125 The nontrivial explication or extraction of information from data, in which the information is implicit and previously unknown; an example is identification of the pattern of use of a credit card to detect possible fraud. The data is normally accessed from one or more databases, so the technique is also known as knowledge discovery in databases (KDD). It involves a number of different methods from artificial intelligence such as neural networks and machine induction, together with statistical methods such as cluster analysis and data summarization.