Relevance of counting in data mining tasks

Abstract

In many languages, the English word "computer" is often literally translated to "the counting machine." Counting is apparently the most elementary operation that a computer can do, and thus it should be trivial to a computer to count. This, however, is a misconception. The apparently simple operation of enumeration and counting is actually computationally hard. It is also one of the most important elementary operation for many data mining tasks. We show how capital counting is for a variety of data mining applications and how this complex task can be achieved with acceptable efficiency. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.