Chapter 41: Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.

Abstract

With the advances of information technology and widespread diffusion of databases systems in organizations, large volumes of data are generated and collected by organizations. This dramatic expansion of data has generated an urgent need for new analysis techniques that can intelligently and automatically transform the processed data into useful information and knowledge. As a result, knowledge discovery and data mining have increased in importance and economic value. Knowledge discovery refers to the overall process of discovering useful knowledge from data, while data mining refers to the extraction of patterns from data. This chapter provides a reasonably comprehensive review of knowledge discovery and its associated data mining techniques. Based on the kinds of knowledge that can be discovered in databases, data mining techniques can be broadly structured into several categories, including classification, clustering, dependency analysis, data visualization, and text mining. Representative data mining techniques for each category are depicted in this chapter.[ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]