Let's first gain a general view on the main components of a data mining architecture. It is basically composed of all of the basic elements you will need to perform the activities described in the previous chapter. As a minimum set of components, the following are usually considered:

• Data sources
• Data warehouse
• Data mining engine
• User interface

We can find reproduced here a useful logical map of a data mining architecture, where each of the mentioned components is depicted, highlighting through grey arrows the one and two verses connection within the components:

We are going to get into more details in the next paragraph; nevertheless, we can briefly have a look at all these components to get a clear sense of their reciprocal relationships:

• Data sources: These are all the possible sources of small bits of information to be analyzed. Data sources feed our data warehouses and are fed by the data produced from our activity toward the user interface.
• Data warehouse: This is where the data is stored when acquired from data sources.
• Data mining engine: This contains all of the logic and the processes needed to perform the actual data mining activity, taking data from the data warehouse.
• User interface: The front office of our machine, which allows the user to interact with the data mining engine, creating data that will be stored within the data warehouse and that could become part of the big ocean of data sources.

Now that we have a clearer picture of how things work, let's have a closer look at every single element.