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Before you can mine the data, you must understand the data. You should answer questions like these:
Where is the data? Is the data in an Oracle database?
Do I have all of the data that I need? For example, adding demographic data to sales data may result in better predictions.
Is the data in one table or in several tables? Are the tables in the same database?
What is the data quality? Are there many missing values? Are there many incorrect values?
How is the data distributed? For example, what are the mean and standard deviation?
Are some columns strongly related (highly correlated)?
Are the attributes that needed to solve the problem present in the data? Is it necessary to define new attributes based on the data?
Understanding the data is closely related to preparing the data. You may find yourself moving between these two steps often.
Both Oracle Warehouse Builder and Oracle Data Miner help you understand you data. The statistics functions included with Oracle Database can also help you understand the data.