CISSP Study Guide: The Data Mining Process

Data mining is the process of analyzing data to identify and interpret patterns and relationships about the data. The end-result of data mining is metadata, or data about data. The patterns gleaned from the data can help organizations get a clearer perspective on their competitors and understand behavior and patterns of their customers to carry out strategic marketing.

Information acquired from the metadata should be returned for inclusion into the data warehouse to be available for future queries and metadata analyses. The data mining technique is useful in security situations to monitor anomalies or determine whether there are aggregation or inference problems and for analyzing audit information.