All you need to know about Data mining

In the second half of season 4 of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, the titular character finds out the company she works for engages in data mining. Given the show is quirky, the geeky adolescent CEO explains, “We dive into phone cameras to look around people’s surroundings and also up inside their mouths to determine their socio-economic status.”

While the episode was being ambitious in its tech industry commentary, the mention is excuse enough for the not-so-tech-savvy folks out there to ask, ‘what is data mining?’

Breaking away from the Kimmy Schmidt definition, data mining is an analytic process designed to explore data (usually large amounts of typically business or market-related data or ‘Big Data’) and to seek out consistent patterns and/or systematic relationships between variables, which are usually individuals, organisations, societies and corporations.