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 fro

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.