An overview of data mining

With the rapid development of information technology, the scale of a database increasingly grows. The problem, how to translate the large number data in a database into useful information and knowledge, is concerned by the academies and industries. At this point, data mining emerges and receives great concerns from the information industry and the whole society. In this paper, we firstly describe the development history of the data mining technology. Then their main methods and the application fields are summarized, and the ways to realize data mining is given. Finally, their future trends are discussed.