Data Mining in a Nutshell

Abstract

Data mining, the central activity in the process of knowledge discovery in databases, is concerned with finding patterns in data. This chapter introduces and illustrates the most common types of patterns considered by data mining approaches and gives rough outlines of the data mining algorithms that are most frequently used to look for such patterns. It also briefly introduces relational data mining, starting with patterns that involve multiple relations and laying down the basic principles common to relational data mining algorithms. An overview of the contents of this book is given, as well as pointers to literature and Internet resources on data mining.