Data Mining

The convergence of computing and communication has produced a society that feeds on information. Yet most of the information is in its raw form: data. If data is characterized as recorded facts, then information is the set of patterns, or expectations, that underlie the data. There is a huge amount of information locked up in databases—information that is potentially important but has not yet been discovered or articulated. Our mission is to bring it forth.

Data mining is the extraction of implicit, previously unknown, and potentially useful information from data. The idea is to build computer programs that sift through databases automatically, seeking regularities or patterns. Strong patterns, if found, will likely generalize to make accurate predictions on future data. Of course, there will be problems. Many patterns will be banal and uninteresting. Others will be spurious, contingent on accidental coincidences in the particular dataset used. And real data is imperfect: Some parts will be garbled, some missing. Anything that is discovered will be inexact: There will be exceptions to every rule and cases not covered by any rule. Algorithms need to be robust enough to cope with imperfect data and to extract regularities that are inexact but useful.

Machine learning provides the technical basis of data mining. It is used to extract information from the raw data in databases—information that is expressed in a comprehensible form and can be used for a variety of purposes. The process is one of abstraction: taking the data, warts and all, and inferring whatever structure underlies it. This book is about the tools and techniques of machine learning that are used in practical data mining for finding, and describing, structural patterns in data.

As with any burgeoning new technology that enjoys intense commercial attention, the use of data mining is surrounded by a great deal of hype in the technical—and sometimes the popular—press. Exaggerated reports appear of the secrets that can be uncovered by setting learning algorithms loose on oceans of data. But there is no magic in machine learning, no hidden power, no alchemy. Instead, there is an identifiable body of simple and practical techniques that can often extract useful information from raw data. This book describes these techniques and shows how they work.

Materi Referensi :
1. Romi Satria Wahono, B.Eng., M.Eng. ( 1; 2; 3; 4; 5 )