Handbook of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery

Citation

Mann, C.J.H. (2004), "Handbook of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery", Kybernetes, Vol. 33 No. 7, pp. 1222-1223. https://doi.org/10.1108/03684920410534524

Handbooks are not only difficult to compile but also both difficult to review and often enough, difficult to use. There is no argument that this compilation contains a wealth of relevant information to what it properly described as “knowledge discovery in databases”. It sticks to this brief and provides details and analysis of current tools and methodologies that have been developed to deal with the great store of data held in the databases of the world's organisations and institutions. Business and industrial databases are obvious targets for knowledge discovery and for knowledge processing, but there are a multitude of other applications. Fortunately, there are so many common factors and basic operations in this field that can transfer from one application to another entirely different one.

In addition to an excellent introduction to data mining, it provides details of applications and case studies. These were real‐life studies taken from a variety of business, industrial and scientific endeavours. They featured real estate, marketing, finance as well as medicine, pharmacology, engineering and the sciences.

The handbook provided information about the most useful tools currently available for data mining as well as about the most relevant technologies. The latest results of applying the emerging techniques of artificial intelligence (AI) were included, as were discussions about the use of neural nets. The editors have cleverly integrated the important concepts used in data mining and introduced sufficient theory to provide a basis for the examination of techniques and applications presented later and used in the case studies.

Anyone who is interested in this subject will benefit from having this text and since it is a handbook the information that is relevant to the application can easily be found. Although as with most books that deal with advanced applications of technology it will need updating with time, but some of the basic information will have a useful lifespan.

Students particularly will find it easy to use as will anyone who works in this area in one of the many applications that require a good working knowledge on the modern methods of storing, processing and accessing data in all its forms.