Data Mining and Its Applications in Higher Education

mining is the process of discovering " hidden messages, " patterns and knowledge within large amounts of data and of making predictions for outcomes or behaviors. This chapter discusses in detail the theoretical and practical aspects of data mining and provides a case study of its application to college transfer data. The first chapter has afforded readers an opportunity to review the definitions and components of knowledge management. The chapter also established that knowledge management is closely linked to technology. Explicit knowledge, which is a product of several major technologies, is the focus of this chapter. Specifically, this chapter addresses data mining. One among a host of recent technology innovations, data mining is making changes to the entire makeup of our skills and comfort zones in information analysis. Not only does it introduce an array of new concepts, methods, and phrases, it also departs from the well-established, traditional, hypothesis-based statistical techniques. Data mining is a new type of exploratory and predictive data analysis whose purpose is to delineate systematic relations between variables when there are no (or incomplete) a pri-ori expectations as to the nature of those relations. Herman Hollerith's invention of punch cards in 1880 and of a counting machine for the 1890 census led to the development of modern data management and computing techniques. Thearling (1995) even chronicled the evolution of data as data collection in the 1960s, data access in the 1980s, data navigation in the 1990s, and data mining in the new century. Thearling (1995) and others foresaw the possibilities of data mining as a result of maturity of all three disciplines: massive data collection and storage, powerful multiprocessor computers, and data mining algorithms. According to Rubenking (2001), " data mining is a logical evolution in database technology. The earliest databases, which served as simple replacements for paper records, were data repositories that provided little more than the capability to summarize and report. With the development of query tools such as SQL