Data mining involves discovering patterns and trends in large data sets. It uses techniques from statistics, mathematics, and computer science to find hidden patterns and relationships in the data. Data mining has applications in marketing, finance, manufacturing, and healthcare to gain insights from data. The data mining process involves defining the problem, preparing data, exploring and analyzing the data, building models, validating models, and deploying the best models. Issues in data mining include handling different data types, incorporating background knowledge, and protecting privacy and security. Active areas of research will continue advancing data mining techniques.