Which phase of data mining focuses on understanding the business goals and project objectives?

The phase of data mining that focuses on understanding the business goals and project objectives is Business Understanding. In this phase, the primary emphasis is on defining what the organization aims to achieve through the data mining project. It involves identifying the key issues the project will address, the desired outcomes, and how success will be measured.

This phase sets the foundation for all subsequent stages of the data mining process. Without a clear understanding of the business needs, the data preparation, modeling, and evaluation phases may not align properly with the overarching objectives of the organization. Thus, establishing the goals at the outset ensures that the entire data mining effort is strategically directed towards delivering actionable insights that can lead to informed decision-making.

The other phases, while critical in their own right, serve different purposes; for instance, data preparation involves cleaning and organizing the data, data understanding focuses on exploring and analyzing the data itself, and modeling is concerned with applying algorithms to the prepared data to build predictive models.