Data Mining and Operational Research: Techniques and Applications

The role of databases is increasing in all enterprises. Data mining has become a fundamental approach that helps all enterprises to analyze data for various purposes. The operations research field has contributed significantly to find solution of numerous data mining problems as optimization problems. Several operations research applications can also be addressed using data mining methods. This paper provides a survey of the intersection of operations research and data mining and provides comprehensive references to other important work in the area. This paper also looks at both the different optimization methods that can be used for data mining, as well as the data mining process itself and how operations research methods can be used in almost every step of this process. Promising directions for future research are also identified throughout the paper. Finally this paper provides a description of the basic concepts and methodologies of influential DM techniques, and discusses how OR can be applied to these techniques.