I am taking a class in data mining and learned a few things I wanted to share. As you might know, data mining is a process of finding previously unknown, non-trivial patterns from high volumes of data. It is highly used in industry where actionable results are required to make business decision. I will start with two different process of data mining.

Unsupervised Data Mining: There is no target variable. One of the examples is Association Analysis (AA), which is also called Market Basket Analysis. Association analysis basically tells you what things occur together.

Supervised Data Mining: In this technique, target variable is present. For instance: neural network and decision tree. Decision tree has a target variable set, and it helps us understand the path is takes to reach to the leaf from the root note.