Advances in information technology and data collection methods have led to the availability of large data sets in commercial enterprises and in a wide variety of scientific and engineering disciplines. Examples of such large data sets in the scientific domain are genomic data (Biology), climate data (Earth Sciences), sky survey data (Astronomy), and computational simulations that run on high performance computers. In the commercial domain, the use of bar codes in commercial outlets, the computerization of business transactions, and the explosion of e-businesses are also providing a flood of data.

We have an unprecedented opportunity to analyze this data and extract intelligent and useful information. The field of data mining draws upon extensive work in areas such as statistics, machine learning, pattern recognition, databases, and high performance computing to discover interesting and previously unknown information in data sets.