1. Data mining, the extraction of hidden .......... information from large databases, is a powerful new technology with great potential to help companies focus on the most important information in their data warehouses.

2. Data mining tools estimate future trends and behaviors, allowing businesses to make knowledge-.......... decisions.

3. The automated, prospective analyses offered by data mining move beyond the analyses of past events provided by .......... tools typical of decision support systems.

4. Data mining tools can answer business questions that traditionally were too time-consuming to resolve; they .......... databases for hidden patterns, finding information that experts may miss because it lies outside their expectations.

5. Data mining derives its name from the similarities between searching for valuable business information in a large database — for example, finding linked products in gigabytes of store scanner data — and mining a mountain for a .......... of valuable ore.

6. Both processes require either .......... through an immense amount of material, or intelligently probing it to find exactly where the value resides.

7. Data mining tools sweep through databases and identify previously hidden patterns like .......... data that could represent data entry keying errors.

8. The technique that is used to perform these feats in data mining is called modeling, and this act of model building is something that people have been doing for a long time, certainly before the .......... of computers or data mining technology.

9. If someone told you that he had a good model to predict customer usage, the first thing you might try would be to ask him to apply his model to your customer .......... where you already knew the answer.

10. With data mining, the best way to accomplish this is by setting aside some of your data in a .......... to isolate it from the mining process; once the mining is complete, the results can be tested against the isolated data to confirm the model's validity.