International Research Journal of Education and Technology

Data mining refers to extracting or mining knowledge from large amounts of data. If we see the data that have been stored in our data warehouses and databases like a mountain, the gems are buried within the mountain. The companies are asking is how to extract this value. The answer is Data mining. Data mining helps end users to extract useful business information from large databases. There are many technologies available to data mining practitioners, including Artificial Neural Networks, Regression, and Decision Trees. Many practitioners are wary of Neural Networks due to their black box nature, even though they have proven themselves in many situations. Data mining is a multidisciplinary field bridging many technical areas such as databases technology, statistics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, pattern recognition and data visualization methods. Data mining is an essential step in the process of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD). This paper is an overview of artificial neural networks and questions their preferred by tool of data mining practitioners.)

Key Words: Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Neural network Topology, back propagation