Forecasting of Crops Using Data Mining Techniques

The past two decades has seen a dramatic increase in the amount of information or data being stored in electronic format. This accumulation of data has taken place at an explosive rate. It has been estimated that the amount of information in the world doubles every 20 months and the size and number of databases are increasing even faster. Data storage became easier as the availability of large amounts of computing power at low cost i.e. the cost of processing power and storage is falling, made data cheap. There was also the introduction of new machine learning methods for knowledge representation based on logic programming etc. in addition to traditional statistical analysis of data. The new methods tend to be computationally intensive hence a demand for more processing power. Having concentrated so much attention on the accumulation of data the problem was what to do with this valuable resource? It was recognised that information is at the heart of business operations and that decision-makers could make use of the data stored to gain valuable insight into the business. Database Management systems gave access to the data stored but this was only a small part of what could be gained from the data. Traditional on-line transaction processing systems, OLTPs, are good at putting data into databases quickly, safely and efficiently but are not good at delivering meaningful analysis in return. Analysing data can provide further knowledge about a business by going beyond the data explicitly stored to derive knowledge about the business. This is where Data Mining or Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) has obvious benefits for any enterprise. Data mining is a powerful technology with great potential to help companies or government focus on the most important information in their data warehouses.