In the 1960s, statisticians and economists used terms like data fishing or data dredging to refer to what they considered the bad practice of analyzing data without an a-priori hypothesis. The term "data mining" was used in a

The knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) process is commonly defined with the stages:
1. Selection
2. Pre-processing
3. Transformation

There have been some efforts to define standards for the data mining process, for example, the 1999 European Cross Industry Standard Process

While the term "data mining" itself may have no ethical implications, it is often associated with the mining of information in relation to user behavior (ethical and otherwise).

The manual extraction of patterns from data has occurred for centuries. Early methods of identifying patterns in data include Bayes' theorem (1700s) and regression analysis (1800s). The proliferation, ubiquity and increasing power of computer

The premier professional body in the field is the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Special Interest Group (SIG) on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD). Since 1989, this ACM SIG has hosted an annual international conference and published

Data mining is used wherever there is digital data available today. Notable examples of data mining can be found throughout business,