Data mining is all about identifying patterns in large amounts of data to find meaningful information to guide decision making. The output of data mining is depicted in visual dashboards, reports, or other decision-making systems.

Data mining is a general term that describes different descriptive, diagnostic, and predictive techniques:

• Description data mining techniques: This type of data mining is concerned with finding patterns in data that can highlight information, such as similarities between customers, employees, or products (to name a few).
• Diagnostic data mining techniques: This type of data mining is concerned with showing why a certain pattern exists and is often used in the format of decision trees or other segmentation techniques.
• Predictive data mining techniques: This type of data mining is concerned with regression- or neural network-based techniques that can show the likelihood of something being true. 

Let's now consider when you can use these techniques as part of your role as a business analyst.