Data mining is an important part of business intelligence and refers to discovering interesting patterns from large amounts of data. It involves applying techniques from multiple disciplines like statistics, machine learning, and information science to large datasets. While organizations collect vast amounts of data, data mining is needed to extract useful knowledge and insights from it. Some common techniques of data mining include classification, clustering, association analysis, and outlier detection. Data mining tools can help organizations apply these techniques to gain intelligence from their data warehouses.