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Data mining, also called Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD), is the field of discovering novel and potentially useful information from large amounts of data. Data mining has been applied in a great number of fields, including retail sales, bioinformatics, and counter-terrorism. In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the use of data mining to investigate scientific questions within educational research, an area of inquiry termed educational data mining. Educational data mining (also referred to as “EDM”) is defined as the area of scientific inquiry centered around the development of methods for making discoveries within the unique kinds of data that come from educational settings, and using those methods to better understand students and the settings which they learn in.

Educational data mining methods often differ from methods from the broader data mining literature, in explicitly exploiting the multiple levels of meaningful hierarchy in educational data. Methods from the psychometrics literature are often integrated with methods from the machine learning and data mining literatures to achieve this goal.