Abstract
Data mining has been successful because of the users'needs to get useful knowledge from large database in computers and the tremendous progress of computing power. Although the era of trial use is over and users are getting good results, it is still hard to figure the whole picture of data mining because of the wide range of its applications. This paper covers the current status of data mining mainly in the viewpoint of business application. In this paper, at first we point out the importance of overall process of data mining to get useful knowledge from vast amount of data. Then we review some techniques of common use, and overview the difference between statistical analysis and data mining. We also refer to some guidelines for selecting software packages, some application cases, challenges for data mining and future directions.
