A survey of data mining and knowledge discovery software tools

Knowledge discovery in databases is a rapidly growing field, whose development is driven by strong research interests as well as urgent practical, social, and economical needs. While the last few years knowledge discovery tools have been used mainly in research environments, sophisticated software products are now rapidly emerging. In this paper, we provide an overview of common knowledge discovery tasks and approaches to solve these tasks. We propose a feature classification scheme that can be used to study knowledge and data mining software. This scheme is based on the software's general characteristics, database connectivity, and data mining characteristics. We then apply our feature classification scheme to investigate 43 software products, which are either research prototypes or commercially available. Finally, we specify features that we consider important for knowledge discovery software to possess in order to accommodate its users effectively, as well as issues that are either not addressed or insufficiently solved yet.

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