Discuss whether or not each of the following activities is a data mining task.

(a) Dividing the customers of a company according to their gender.
(b) Dividing the customers of a company according to their prof-
itability.
(c) Computing the total sales of a company.
Sorting a student database based on student identification num-
bers.
Predicting the outcomes of tossing a (fair) pair of dice.
(f) Predicting the future stock price of a company using historical
records.

(a) No. This is a simple database query.
(b) No. This is an accounting calculation, followed by the applica-
tion of a threshold. However, predicting the profitability of a new
customer would be data mining.
(c) No. Again, this is simple accounting.
(d) No. Again, this is a simple database query.
(e) No. Since the die is fair, this is a probability calculation. If the
die were not fair, and we needed to estimate the probabilities of
each outcome from the data, then this is more like the problems
considered by data mining. However, in this specific case, solu-
tions to this problem were developed by mathematicians a long
time ago, and thus, we wouldn’t consider it to be data mining.
(f) Yes. We would attempt to create a model that can predict the
continuous value of the stock price. This is an example of the