ABSTRACT

This chapter offers an introduction to the fascinating world of data mining and knowledge discovery. One might learn about the basics of data mining and how data mining has been applied to solve real-world problems. The chapter focuses on fundamental definitions and terminology and it discusses how computers are best at learning concept definitions and how concept definitions can be transformed into useful patterns. It offers guidance in understanding the types of problems that may be appropriate for data mining. The chapter explains how knowledge engineering builds models by extracting problem-solving knowledge from one or more human experts. It explores why using a simple table search may not be an appropriate data mining strategy. The chapter also offers a simple process model for data mining and discusses big data and cloud computing. It looks at one of the most common business applications for data mining.