Data Mining is the process of extracting actionable knowledge from data. In some respect it can be viewed as the bridge between Machine Learning research and business operations. Whereas Machine Learning research tends to focus on algorithm design, i.e., start with an algorithm and ask what applications it performs well on and how it can be extended to increase applicability (cover more applications), Data Mining focuses on business/scientific problems, i.e., start with an application and ask what learning algorithm is most likely to perform well on it or what the impact of the representation is or yet what happens when new data becomes available.