Data mining is the ability to drill-down on KPIs and KQIs in order to find the root cause for the indicators' results. The actual data mining task can be automatic or semi-automatic analysis of large quantities of data in order to extract previously unknown interesting patterns such as groups of data records (cluster analysis), unusual records (anomaly detection) and dependencies (association rule mining). These patterns can then be seen as a kind of summary of the input data, and used in further analysis or for example in machine learning and predictive analytics. For example, the data mining step might identify multiple groups in the data, which can then be used to obtain more accurate prediction results by a decision support system.