Data Analysis
Descriptive, Predictive, and Prescriptive analytics
Descriptive analytics explain current data sets. Understanding why something happened allows for other analysis such as predictive and prescriptive analytics. Data that has patterns can be used to predict future data trends. Prescriptive analytics happen after predictive analytics take place. Understanding the problem and knowing future trends allow resources to be allocated towards future trends.
Exploratory data Analysis
Data mining
Data mining is the search for useful patterns of data within large data sets. Before the, "digging" begins, the miner must have an idea of what they are looking for. Once they have an idea, they look for clusters, outliers, etc that designates useful data. Not all mining sessions provide useful data. Artificial intelligence is particularly useful because the AI can learn to improve its searching techniques.