Data mining deals with finding patterns in data that are by user-definition, interesting and valid. It is an interdisciplinary area involving databases, machine learning, pattern recognition, statistics, visualization and others.
Decision support focuses on developing systems to help decision-makers solve problems. Decision support provides a selection of data analysis, simulation, visualization and modeling techniques, and software tools such as decision support systems, group decision support and mediation systems, expert systems, databases and data warehouses.

Independently,...

Intelligent data analysis, data mining and knowledge discovery in databases have recently gained the attention of a large number of researchers and practitioners. This is witnessed by the rapidly increasing number of submissions and participants at related conferences and workshops, by the emergence of new journals in this area (e.g., Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, Intelligent Data Analysis, etc.), and by the increasing number of new applications in this field. In our view, the awareness of these challenging research fields and emerging technologies has been much larger in industry than...