Recently, data management and processing for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has become a topic of active research in several fields of computer science, such as the distributed systems, the database systems, and the data mining. The main aim of deploying the WSNs-based applications is to make the real-time decision which has been proved to be very challenging due to the highly resource-constrained computing, communicating capacities, and huge volume of fast-changed data generated by WSNs. This challenge motivates the research community to explore novel data mining techniques dealing with extracting knowledge from large continuous arriving data from WSNs. Traditional data mining techniques are not directly applicable to WSNs due to the nature of sensor data, their special characteristics, and limitations of the WSNs. This work provides an overview of how traditional data mining algorithms are revised and improved to achieve good performance in a wireless sensor network environment. A comprehensive survey of existing data mining techniques and their multilevel classification scheme is presented. The taxonomy together with the comparative tables can be used as a guideline to select a technique suitable for the application at hand. Based on the limitations of the existing technique, an adaptive data mining framework of WSNs for future research is proposed.