What is the purpose of data mining?

The purpose of data mining is primarily to discover insights and patterns from large datasets. This process involves analyzing vast amounts of data to uncover hidden relationships, trends, or specific patterns that are not immediately apparent. By employing various statistical, mathematical, and computational techniques, data mining helps organizations make data-driven decisions, predict future trends, and ultimately gain a competitive advantage. This insight generation is invaluable across various fields, including business, healthcare, finance, and many others.

The focus on discovering insights distinguishes data mining from other activities, such as data visualization or data compression. While visualizing data trends can help present the findings of data mining in an understandable manner, it is not the main purpose of data mining itself. Similarly, compressing data files and erasing unnecessary data relate to data management and storage optimization rather than the exploration and analysis of the data for insight generation.