What is directed data mining and undirected data mining?

In directed data mining, you are trying to predict a particular data point - the sales price of a house given information about other houses for sale in the neighborhood, for example.

In undirected data mining, you are trying to create groups of data, or find patterns in existing data - creating the "Soccer Mom" demographic group, for example. In effect, every U.S. census is data mining, as the government looks to gather data about everyone in the country and turn it into useful information.