Data Mining vs Data Science

In this article, we'll explain the differences between data mining and data science - two fields of predictive analytics that have emerged over the past decade as integral tools for business success. You will also learn why they are equally important and necessary in developing effective data-driven solutions. As a reader, you will gain valuable insight into this topic and will be able to make more informed decisions in your data-related activities.

Businesses and organizations began to recognize the immense value contained in the huge amounts of data collected daily. This prompted them to implement and adopt new approaches to fulfill this potential and value.

Both data science and data mining play critical roles in assisting businesses in recognizing possibilities and making sound judgments when dealing with the ever-increasing volume of data. While the purpose of all areas is to gain insights that might help a business thrive, there are significant distinctions in the tools and techniques employed, the nature of the task, and the procedures taken to execute various roles to achieve this objective.

This blog explains the difference between data mining and data science in detail.

Data Mining vs Data Science - Table of Contents

What is Data Science?

Data science is the field of study that deals with a massive amount of data; the data studied helps to find innovative solutions to complex problems. 

It extracts valuable information from structured and unstructured data by combining modern tools, complex algorithms, and machine-learning concepts. It is getting insights, capturing, analyzing, and utilizing the data. The information extracted helps businesses in making decisions.

Data scientists collect information from various sources, which are present in different formats, then analyze and communicate the findings. This affects business by creating effective data-driven decisions; it combines the business with computer science and statistics. 

A data scientist is considered a blend of a data analyst, an AI researcher, a deep learning engineer, and a machine learning engineer. They might do the role of a data engineer as well.

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Applications of Data Science

Application #1. Fraud and Risk Detection

Data science helps in fraud and risk detection by analyzing the data and finding functional patterns and correlations from large datasets. It also identifies fraudulent activity and risk before it takes place. It helps the banking services, tax departments, and different industries to help them identify unusual patterns using data science techniques.

Application #2. Targeted Advertising

It helps businesses find the right people and instant to promote or advertise. Data scientists help to collect customer databases by analyzing digital marketing algorithms and checking purchases; it allows the marketer to promote the product to the right person. It saves time and money for the advertiser as they find a targeted audience interested in the message they deliver.

Application #3. Speech Recognition

Speech recognition is accomplished through data science; processes and algorithms are implemented from structured or unstructured data. With the help of machine learning, big data analytics, and deep learning, speech recognition is achieved. Speech is converted into text format like in virtual assistant.

Application #4. Healthcare

Many datasets in the healthcare system need to be managed and analyzed, which is done with the help of data science tools. It helps the doctor with information gained from big data, including patients' medical records and all other health data. Also, it helps find defects in the human body through image recognition.

Application #5. Website Recommendations

It improves personalized user experience by recommending to users similar websites for the product or the user of the resource searching for; it also uses our past data to analyze and give you the recommendation. E-commerce websites use data science to help customers with the product they are searching for.

Application #6. Advanced Image Recognition

Data science helps in advanced image recognition; you can upload an image to search for the source of the image or if you want to find information regarding the image. Also, if we upload a photo on social media with the help of image recognition, it recognizes the faces in the picture and suggests you tag the person.

Application #7. Internet Search

The search engine uses the data science algorithm to give the required search results. It is used in SEO (Search Engine Optimization). It checks which website is visited often and which includes the keyword you are searching for. Most visited links come at the top because of the algorithm.

Application #8. Airline Route Planning

Data science is helping in the airline sector with planning about the handling and fueling of flights, knowing passenger demands and occupancy, the routes, and also letting you know if the flight is going to be delayed. It uses AI with a built-in machine learning algorithm to take insights and analyze flight data.

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Steps in the Data Science Process

The data science process is made up of six steps, which are:

  • Understanding the Problem: Before solving a problem, you need to know what it is. Data questions need to be turned into business questions that you can act on.
  • Getting the Raw Data Needed to Solve the Problem: To get the required information to find insights and possible solutions, you can either look through your own databases or buy databases from outside sources.
  • Processing the Data for Analysis: Before analyzing the data to get more accurate insights, the data must be processed.
  • Exploring the Data: This is a very important step involving coming up with ideas to help find hidden patterns and insights.
  • Data Modeling & Evaluation in-depth Analysis: At this stage, math, statistics, and technology skills, as well as data science tools, must be used to successfully crunch the data, find every possible insight, and figure out other important factors. The quantitative and qualitative information can be put together and used.
  • Deployment the Results of the Analysis: In this step, insights are shared with the sales head to help them understand how important the findings are and how they can help the business grow.

 

Data science process

 

What is Data Mining?

Data mining is extracting crucial information from a large set of datasets using a mathematical algorithm and transforming it into an understandable structure for future use.

With the extraction of useful data, data mining finds the hidden pattern in the raw data and changes, cleans, and integrates data. It analyzes and correlates data from the raw data, which often helps to identify future events. Data mining requires powerful computational technologies.

It can be applied in various fields for data analysis to find the results. Retail and financial industries use data mining to analyze data and identify a pattern that helps increase the customer base and foretell stock market variation. Furthermore, it is used by artificial intelligence to build machine learning models. Data mining experts make algorithms to discover the data structure. To succeed in data mining, you should have an eye for identifying patterns and hands-on coding.

 

What is Data Mining?

 

Applications of Data Mining

Application #1. Market Analysis

A lot of different organizations, including the Banking sector, make use of data mining to have a better understanding of market risks. It finds its utility in credit ratings and intelligent anti-fraud systems, which are responsible for analyzing transactions, card transactions, purchasing patterns, and many other financial data relating to the customer.

Application #2. Financial Analysis

Data mining techniques are often used for the extraction of subliminal patterns and prediction of future trends as well as behaviors when it comes to financial markets. The economic analysis of data is an important thing to consider for businesses as it will provide them an insight into how to make a stable and profitable investment.

Application #3. Higher Education

When it comes to educational data mining, it can be utilized to predict the performance of a student, dropouts, and professors. It helps schools and universities track students' academic progress and allows them to do better after analyzing their performance.

Application #4. Fraud Detection

If we understand the fundamentals of data mining, it is all about understanding and analyzing patterns, outlining anomalies, and understanding outliers. When it comes to Fraud detection, analytics relies on machine learning to reveal patterns and send the information to algorithms. This, in turn, makes the process of detection easy and prevents the happening of fraudulent actions in the future.

 

Applications of data mining

 

Steps in the Data Mining Process

Data Mining, also called "knowledge discovery in data" (KDD), can be done with simple or complex software. Data mining is made up of the following steps:

  • Data Collection: It collects data and keeps track of it. The data is listed by where it came from, how it was gathered, and if there were any problems. The data is then put into a picture and checked to ensure it is complete.
  • Data Understanding: This means explaining and understanding the business's goal, how it works, and the essential things that will help it reach its goal.
  • Data Preparation: It involves choosing valid data, cleaning it, making attributes from it, and putting data from different databases together.
  • Modeling: It involves choosing data mining techniques, making test designs for evaluating the chosen model, building a model from the datasets, and having experts assess the model to find out what it means.
  • Evaluation: This step tests the model against real-world applications to see how well it meets the business requirements.
  • Deployment: It makes a plan for deployment and a way to check if the data mining model is useful by keeping it up to date and keeping an eye on it.

 

Data mining process

Data Mining vs Data Science - Comparison

 Data MiningData Science
What is it?Data mining is mainly about finding hidden patterns through helpful information from the existing database. It is a technique that deals with analyzing data to reach conclusions. It is for businesses that need specific information from the data, involves statistical modeling, and deals with only structured information that can give historical reports which can be compared to current data.It is a diverse field that contains the whole process of taking insights, capturing, analyzing, and obtaining valuable information. It is the science of getting information from an extensive database. Data scientist deals with every type of data, whether it is structured, semi-structured, or unstructured. It covers broad techniques, applications, and fields. Data captured can also be used in scientific studies.
FocusData mining mainly helps businesses and industries to have insights and gain valuable information, and discover the hidden patterns which will help them in future planning, learning about the key problems with the customer database, which will help them to grow their organization and business by taking the correct decision with the help of data. It is knowledge discovery through the database.Data science combines AI, deep learning, and machine learning. Performs multiple operations, including analyzing and creating structure from the data gained. Able to forecast future events by the extracted data. The data captures are also used for scientific study and purposes and various other operations.
GoalThe goal of data mining specialists is to make data more essential and usable by extracting only important information from the massive database and transforming it into organized information. The specific information businesses need to gain through data mining and discovering meaningful patterns and structures.The goal of a data scientist is to build data-centric products for an organization. It explores, sorts, and analyzes data to reach a conclusion that helps in decision-making. It also allows scientists in research to develop the technology. They create predictive models.
OutputData mining algorithms process the data to produce output through patterns or rules. Then, such patterns and principles derive fresh or practical knowledge or information.Data science uses analytics results to solve issues. According to data scientists, using data to investigate something is just analysis. Data science advances analysis to understand better and address issues. Data analytics and data science differ from one another in terms of timeline.
PurposeData science employs the findings from analytics to resolve problems. Data scientists claim that using data to research something is a simple analysis. Data science improves analysis to more fully comprehend and resolve issues. Data science and data analytics have different timelines from one another.The goal of data science is to identify patterns. Knowing patterns helps you comprehend the world. Finding a pattern is the initial step towards development in everything, from a mechanic car repair to a scientist producing a scientific discovery.
Vocational PerspectiveCurrently, administrators in the field of education are under great strain because of the fast rise in higher vocational student enrollment. Student management, curriculum design, and teaching evaluation contribute to this strain. To address these issues scientifically, a vast amount of data in the field of vocational education needs to be discovered and investigated. The use of data mining technology is ideal.Such platforms, technologies, and tools as Linux, R, Python, SQL, Java, TensorFlow, Tableau, Hadoop, Apache Spark, Docker, etc., should be taught to the students. They must develop critical thinking skills to craft thought-provoking inquiries and comprehend events and problems from various angles.
ExtentResearch and science are just two examples of the many domains used in data mining. With data mining, organizations may use resources more effectively by learning more about their consumers and creating more successful plans for various company tasks.With many tools, algorithms, and machine learning concepts, data science aims to extract hidden patterns from unorganized data.
Deals with (the type of data)Data mining is the procedure of examination and analysis of vast chunks of data to discover significant patterns and trends. Several applications exist, including database marketing, fraud detection, spam email screening, and user sentiment analysis.Data science is a discipline that uses state-of-the-art technologies and techniques to process large datasets in order to discover previously unseen patterns, extract useful insights, and inform strategic business decisions. Using complex machine learning techniques, data scientists may create very accurate predictive models.
Other less popular namesMany data mining tools like Orange, Knime, Sisense, and Apache Mahout. There are a lot of Data Science tools like BigML, D3, and Tableau.

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Data Science vs Data Mining - FAQs

1. Is data mining part of data science?

Data mining is an integral part of data science to extract information through data and convert it into an understandable model.

2. What are the three types of data mining?

In terms of analysis, it has two types:

  • Predictive Data Mining Analysis
  • Descriptive Data Mining Analysis.

Other types include:

  • Pictorial data mining
  • Text mining 
  • Web mining.

3. Does a data analyst do data mining?

Yes. Data mining is a key step in data analysis. The data analyst uses data collected in data mining to build the structure.

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4. Is data mining easy to learn?

It may be easier than it seems. If you have the right tools and coding skills, learn data analysis and have an eye for finding patterns, then you will find it easy to adapt.

5. Is data mining a good career?

There is an increasing demand for data mining specialists. It is a profitable career, as many industries have started adopting to have insights into the data. 

6. Does data mining require coding?

Yes. Along with the software knowledge, data mining specialists should also know coding; languages like R and python are used.

Conclusion

The huge amount of data around us needs to be handled to help businesses with opportunities and future growth by identifying the main problems. Data mining turns raw data into useful information, while data science is a diverse field that includes capturing, storing, analyzing, and obtaining valuable insights from the database. Both have the same objective of handling existing data, which helps different organizations grow, but they may differ in using tools, technology, and responsibilities.

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Last updated: 04 Apr 2023
About Author

 

Madhuri is a Senior Content Creator at MindMajix. She has written about a range of different topics on various technologies, which include, Splunk, Tensorflow, Selenium, and CEH. She spends most of her time researching on technology, and startups. Connect with her via LinkedIn and Twitter .

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