Data Mining and Machine Learning

Data mining is nothing but extracting useful and meaningful data from a huge collection of data.
Many organizations collect large volumes of data relating to their business. This data is not organized and has lot of information. This data is usually collected the day to day business activities of the organization.
Lot of meaningful information can be extracted from this data like, The sales growth pattern, the demographic pattern etc...
There are lot of techniques manual and automatic for extracting meaningful information from this data. These techniques are collectively called data mining. The manual technique involves an expert in the concerned domain and a good data mining software that can be used to drill down into the data. Automated techniques involve usage of some machine learning tools to automatically identify meaningful patterms in data and then apply these patterns to predic future data movement.