This document provides an introduction to data mining, including its motivation, definition, applications, and key concepts. It discusses how the explosion of data has created a need for data mining to extract useful knowledge from large databases. Data mining involves techniques from machine learning, statistics, database technology, and information visualization to discover patterns in data. It can be used for applications like market analysis, risk assessment, and fraud detection. The document outlines the typical steps of the data mining process and different data mining functionalities, such as classification, clustering, and association rule mining. It also notes that not all patterns discovered will be interesting to users.