The present era is the era of rapid, continuous and various changes. In line with these changes, in particular making systems of data collection and registration online and updated, statistical offices, especially the official statistics custodian organizations, have faced a large accumulation of unstructured data and statistics in various formats. In fact, nowadays, “data explosion" has reached a state of which the analysis is not possible with classic statistics and traditional methods.
The official statistics custodian organizations and at their apex, the Statistical Centre of Iran, as the national sole official statistics authority also needs the knowledge to analyze the data and provide it to policy makers and high-ranking officials of the country in order to make precise decisions. It is clear that knowledge and wisdom based on raw and various data will facilitate decision making and planning for future macro plans. Nowadays, most important and in fact the most unique tool for solving this challenge is the use of data mining techniques. Using data mining knowledge, the relationships and hidden patterns in the data are discovered and appear. In fact, data mining refers to interdisciplinary knowledge (mathematics, statistics, and computer science) that aims to create tools for processing big data and extracting hidden patterns and rules governing them. Data mining will play a significant role in all areas where data are collected and needs to be analyzed
Based on its mission to facilitate the analysis of the data for the official statistics, the Statistical Research and Training Centre (SRTC) has included the research project "Data mining in Official Statistics" in its working programme. The purpose of this research project is to introduce some of the data mining methods and their applications in official statistics. This research was conducted by Dr. Abbas Moradi, as project implementor, and Dr. Ayoub Faramarzi, Hamed Lourvand, Dr. Kaveh Kiani and Dr. Ashkan Shabak as contributors to the Project