CHAPTER

Introduction
1
This book is an introduction to the young and fast-growing field of data mining (also known as knowl-
edge discovery from data, or KDD for short). The book focuses on fundamental data mining concepts
and techniques for discovering interesting patterns from data in various applications. In particular, we
emphasize prominent techniques for developing effective, efficient, and scalable data mining tools.
This chapter is organized as follows. In Section 1.1, we learn what is data mining and why data
mining is in high demand. Section 1.2 links data mining with the overall knowledge discovery process.
Next, we learn about data mining from multiple aspects, such as the kinds of data that can be mined
(Section 1.3), the kinds of knowledge to be mined (Section 1.4), the relationship between data mining
and other disciplines (Section 1.5), and data mining applications (Section 1.6). Finally, we discuss the
impact of data mining to society (Section 1.7).

1.1 What is data mining?

Necessity, who is the mother of invention.
– Plato

We live in a world where vast amounts of data are generated constantly and rapidly.
“We are living in the information age” is a popular saying; however, we are actually living in the data
age. Terabytes or petabytes of data pour into our computer networks, the World Wide Web (WWW),
and various kinds of devices every day from business, news agencies, society, science, engineering,
medicine, and almost every other aspect of daily life. This explosive growth of available data volume is
a result of the computerization of our society and the fast development of powerful computing, sensing,
and data collection, storage, and publication tools.
Businesses worldwide generate gigantic data sets, including sales transactions, stock trading
records, product descriptions, sales promotions, company profiles and performance, and customer
feedback. Scientific and engineering practices generate high orders of petabytes of data in a contin-
uous manner, from remote sensing, to process measuring, scientific experiments, system performance,
engineering observations, and environment surveillance. Biomedical research and the health industry
generate tremendous amounts of data from gene sequence machines, biomedical experiment and re-
search reports, medical records, patient monitoring, and medical imaging. Billions of Web searches
supported by search engines process tens of petabytes of data daily. Social media tools have become
increasingly popular, producing a tremendous number of texts, pictures, and videos, generating various
kinds of Web communities and social networks. The list of sources that generate huge amounts of data
is endless.
Data Mining. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-811760-6.00011-4
Copyright © 2023 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1
2 Chapter 1 Introduction

This explosively growing, widely available, and gigantic body of data makes our time truly the data
age. Powerful and versatile tools are badly needed to automatically uncover valuable information from
the tremendous amounts of data and to transform such data into organized knowledge. This necessity
has led to the birth of data mining.
Essentially, data mining is the process of discovering interesting patterns, models, and other kinds
of knowledge in large data sets. The term, data mining, as a vivid view of searching for gold nuggets
from data, appeared in 1990s. However, to refer to the mining of gold from rocks or sand, we say gold
mining instead of rock or sand mining. Analogously, data mining should have been more appropriately
named “knowledge mining from data,” which is unfortunately somewhat long. However, the shorter
term, knowledge mining may not reflect the emphasis on mining from large amounts of data. Neverthe-
less, mining is a vivid term characterizing the process that finds a small set of precious nuggets from a
great deal of raw material. Thus, such a misnomer carrying both “data” and “mining” became a popular
choice. In addition, many other terms have a similar meaning to data mining—for example, knowl-
edge mining from data, KDD (i.e., Knowledge Discovery from Data), pattern discovery, knowledge
extraction, data archaeology, data analytics, and information harvesting.
Data mining is a young, dynamic, and promising field. It has made and will continue to make great
strides in our journey from the data age toward the coming information age.
Example 1.1. Data mining turns a large collection of data into knowledge. A search engine (e.g.,
Google) receives billions of queries every day. What novel and useful knowledge can a search engine
learn from such a huge collection of queries collected from users over time? Interestingly, some patterns
found in user search queries can disclose invaluable knowledge that cannot be obtained by reading
individual data items alone. For example, Google’s Flu Trends uses specific search terms as indicators
of flu activity. It found a close relationship between the number of people who search for flu-related
information and the number of people who actually have flu symptoms. A pattern emerges when all of
the search queries related to flu are aggregated. Using aggregated Google search data, Flu Trends can
estimate flu activity up to two weeks faster than what traditional systems can.1 This example shows
how data mining can turn a large collection of data into knowledge that can help meet a current global
challenge.

1.2 Data mining: an essential step in knowledge discovery

Many people treat data mining as a synonym for another popularly used term, knowledge discovery
from data, or KDD, whereas others view data mining as merely an essential step in the overall process
of knowledge discovery. The overall knowledge discovery process is shown in Fig. 1.1 as an iterative
sequence of the following steps:
1. Data preparation
a. Data cleaning (to remove noise and inconsistent data)
b. Data integration (where multiple data sources may be combined)2

1 This is reported in [GMP+ 09]. The Flu Trend reporting stopped in 2015.
2 A popular trend in the information industry is to perform data cleaning and data integration as a preprocessing step, where the
resulting data are stored in a data warehouse.
 1.2 Data mining: an essential step in knowledge discovery 3

FIGURE 1.1
Data mining: An essential step in the process of knowledge discovery.

c. Data transformation (where data are transformed and consolidated into forms appropriate for
mining by performing summary or aggregation operations)3
d. Data selection (where data relevant to the analysis task are retrieved from the database)
2. Data mining (an essential process where intelligent methods are applied to extract patterns or con-
struct models)
3. Pattern/model evaluation (to identify the truly interesting patterns or models representing knowl-
edge based on interestingness measures—see Section 1.4.7)
4. Knowledge presentation (where visualization and knowledge representation techniques are used
to present mined knowledge to users)
Steps 1(a) through 1(d) are different forms of data preprocessing, where data are prepared for min-
ing. The data mining step may interact with a user or a knowledge base. The interesting patterns are
presented to the user and may be stored as new knowledge in the knowledge base.
The preceding view shows data mining as one step in the knowledge discovery process, albeit an
essential one because it uncovers hidden patterns or models for evaluation. However, in industry, in
media, and in the research milieu, the term data mining is often used to refer to the entire knowledge
discovery process (perhaps because the term is shorter than knowledge discovery from data). Therefore,
we adopt a broad view of data mining functionality: Data mining is the process of discovering inter-

3 Data transformation and consolidation are often performed before the data selection process, particularly in the case of data
warehousing. Data reduction may also be performed to obtain a smaller representation of the original data without sacrificing its
integrity.
4 Chapter 1 Introduction

esting patterns and knowledge from large amounts of data. The data sources can include databases,
data warehouses, the Web, other information repositories, or data that are streamed into the system
dynamically.

1.3 Diversity of data types for data mining

As a general technology, data mining can be applied to any kind of data as long as the data are mean-
ingful for a target application. However, different kinds of data may need rather different data mining
methodologies, from simple to rather sophisticated, making data mining a rich and diverse field.
Structured vs. unstructured data
Based on whether data have clear structures, we can categorize data as structured vs. unstructured
data.
Data stored in relational databases, data cubes, data matrices, and many data warehouses have
uniform, record- or table-like structures, defined by their data dictionaries, with a fixed set of attributes
(or fields, columns), each with a fixed set of value ranges and semantic meaning. These data sets are
typical examples of highly structured data. In many real applications, such strict structural requirement
can be relaxed in multiple ways to accommodate semistructured nature of the data, such as to allow
a data object to contain a set value, a small set of heterogeneous typed values, or nested structures
or to allow the structure of objects or subobjects to be defined flexibly and dynamically (e.g., XML
structures).
There are many data sets that may not be as structured as relational tables or data matrices. However,
they do have certain structures with clearly defined semantic meaning. For example, a transactional
data set may contain a large set of transactions each containing a set of items. A sequence data set may
contain a large set of sequences each containing an ordered set of elements that can in turn contain a
set of items. Many application data sets, such as shopping transaction data, time-series data, gene or
protein data, or Weblog data, belong to this category.
A more sophisticated type of semistructured data set is graph or network data, where a set of nodes
are connected by a set of edges (also called links); and each node/link may have its own semantic
description or substructures.
Each of such categories of structured and semistructured data sets may have special kinds of patterns
or knowledge to be mined and many dedicated data mining methods, such as sequential pattern mining,
graph pattern mining, and information network mining methods, have been developed to analyze such
data sets.
Beyond such structured or semistructured data, there are also large amounts of unstructured data,
such as text data and multimedia (e.g., audio, image, video) data. Although some studies treat them
as one-dimensional or multidimensional byte streams, they do carry a lot of interesting semantics.
Domain-specific methods have been developed to analyze such data in the fields of natural language
understanding, text mining, computer vision, and pattern recognition. Moreover, recent advances on
deep learning have made tremendous progress on processing text, image, and video data. Nevertheless,
mining hidden structures from unstructured data may greatly help understand and make good use of
such data.
The real-world data can often be a mixture of structured data, semistructured data, and unstructured
data. For example, an online shopping website may host information for a large set of products, which
 1.4 Mining various kinds of knowledge 5

can be essentially structured data stored in a relational database, with a fixed set of fields on product
name, price, specifications, and so on. However, some fields may essentially be text, image, and video
data, such as product introduction, expert or user reviews, product images, and advertisement videos.
Data mining methods are often developed for mining some particular type of data, and their results can
be integrated and coordinated to serve the overall goal.

Data associated with different applications

Different applications may generate or need to handle very different data sets and require rather
different data analysis methods. Thus when categorizing data sets for data mining, we should take
specific applications into consideration.
Take sequence data as an example. Biological sequences such as DNA or protein sequences may
have very different semantic meaning from shopping transaction sequences or Web click streams, call-
ing for rather different sequence mining methods. A special kind of sequence data is time-series data
where a time-series may contain an ordered set of numerical values with equal time interval, which is
also rather different from shopping transaction sequences, which may not have fixed time gaps (a cus-
tomer may shop at anytime she likes).
Data in some applications can be associated with spatial information, time information, or both,
forming spatial, temporal, and spatiotemporal data, respectively. Special data mining methods, such
as spatial data mining, temporal data mining, spatiotemporal data mining, or trajectory pattern mining,
should be developed for mining such data sets as well.
For graph and network data, different applications may also need rather different data mining
methods. For example, social networks (e.g., Facebook or LinkedIn data), computer communication
networks, biological networks, and information networks (e.g., authors linking with keywords) may
carry rather different semantics and require different mining methods.
Even for the same data set, finding different kinds of patterns or knowledge may require different
data mining methods. For example, for the same set of software (source) programs, finding plagiarized
subprogram modules or finding copy-and-paste bugs may need rather different data mining techniques.
Rich data types and diverse application requirements call for very diverse data mining methods.
Thus data mining is a rich and fascinating research domain, with lots of new methods waiting to be
studied and developed.

Stored vs. streaming data

Usually, data mining handles finite, stored data sets, such as those stored in various kinds of large
data repositories. However, in some applications such as video surveillance or remote sensing, data may
stream in dynamically and constantly, as infinite data streams. Mining stream data will require rather
different methods than stored data, which may form another interesting theme in our study.

1.4 Mining various kinds of knowledge

Different kinds of patterns and knowledge can be uncovered via data mining. In general, data mining
tasks can be put into two categories: descriptive data mining and predictive data mining. Descrip-
tive mining characterizes properties of the interested set of data, whereas predictive mining performs
induction on the data set in order to make predictions.
6 Chapter 1 Introduction

In this section, we introduce different data mining tasks. These include multidimensional data
summarization (Section 1.4.1); the mining of frequent patterns, associations, and correlations (Sec-
tion 1.4.2); classification and regression (Section 1.4.3); cluster analysis (Section 1.4.4); and outlier
analysis (Section 1.4.6). Different data mining functionalities generate different kinds of results that
are often called patterns, models, or knowledge. In Section 1.4.7, we will also introduce the interest-
ingness of a pattern or a model. In many cases, only interesting patterns or models will be considered
as knowledge.

1.4.1 Multidimensional data summarization

It is often tedious for a user to go over the details of a large set of data. Thus it is desirable to automati-
cally summarize an interested set of data and compare it with the contrasting sets at some high levels.
Such summaritive description of an interested set of data is called data summarization. Data sum-
marization can often be conducted in a multidimensional space. If the multidimensional space is well
defined and frequently used, such as product category, producer, location, or time, massive amounts
of data can be aggregated in the form of data cubes to facilitate user’s drill-down or roll-up of the
summarization space with mouse clicking. The output of such multidimensional summarization can be
presented in various forms, such as pie charts, bar charts, curves, multidimensional data cubes, and
multidimensional tables, including crosstabs.
For structured data, multidimensional aggregation methods have been developed to facilitate such
precomputation or online computation of multidimensional aggregations using data cube technology,
which will be discussed in Chapter 3. For unstructured data, such as text, this task becomes challenging.
We will give a brief discussion of such research frontiers in our last chapter.

1.4.2 Mining frequent patterns, associations, and correlations

Frequent patterns, as the name suggests, are patterns that occur frequently in data. There are many
kinds of frequent patterns, including frequent itemsets, frequent subsequences (also known as sequen-
tial patterns), and frequent substructures. A frequent itemset typically refers to a set of items that often
appear together in a transactional data set—for example, milk and bread, which are frequently bought
together in grocery stores by many customers. A frequently occurring subsequence, such as the pattern
that customers, tend to purchase first a laptop, followed by a computer bag, and then other accessories,
is a (frequent) sequential pattern. A substructure can refer to different structural forms (e.g., graphs,
trees, or lattices) that may be combined with itemsets or subsequences. If a substructure occurs fre-
quently, it is called a (frequent) structured pattern. Mining frequent patterns leads to the discovery of
interesting associations and correlations within data.

Example 1.2. Association analysis. Suppose that, a webstore manager wants to know which items are
frequently purchased together (i.e., in the same transaction). An example of such a rule, mined from
the transactional database, is

buys(X, “computer”) ⇒ buys(X, “webcam”) [support = 1%, confidence = 50%],

where X is a variable representing a customer. A confidence, or certainty, of 50% means that if a cus-
tomer buys a computer, there is a 50% chance that she will buy webcam as well. A 1% support means
 1.4 Mining various kinds of knowledge 7

that 1% of all the transactions under analysis show that computer and webcam are purchased together.
This association rule involves a single attribute or predicate (i.e., buys) that repeats. Association rules
that contain a single predicate are referred to as single-dimensional association rules. Dropping the
predicate notation, the rule can be written simply as “computer ⇒ webcam [1%, 50%].”
Suppose, mining the same database generates another association rule:

age(X, “20..29”) ∧ income(X, “40K..49K”) ⇒ buys(X, “laptop”)

[support = 0.5%, confidence = 60%].

The rule indicates that of all its customers under study, 0.5% are 20 to 29 years old with an income
of $40,000 to $49,000 and have purchased a laptop (computer). There is a 60% probability that a
customer in this age and income group will purchase a laptop. Note that this is an association involving
more than one attribute or predicate (i.e., age, income, and buys). Adopting the terminology used in
multidimensional databases, where each attribute is referred to as a dimension, the above rule can be
referred to as a multidimensional association rule.
Typically, association rules are discarded as uninteresting if they do not satisfy both a minimum
support threshold and a minimum confidence threshold. Additional analysis can be performed to
uncover interesting statistical correlations between associated attribute–value pairs.
Frequent itemset mining is a fundamental form of frequent pattern mining. Mining frequent itemsets,
associations, and correlations will be discussed in Chapter 4. Mining diverse kinds of frequent pattern,
as well as mining sequential patterns and structured patterns, will be covered in Chapter 5.

1.4.3 Classification and regression for predictive analysis

Classification is the process of finding a model (or function) that describes and distinguishes data
classes or concepts. The model is derived based on the analysis of a set of training data (i.e., data
objects for which the class labels are known). The model is used to predict the class labels of objects
for which the class labels are unknown.
Depending on the classification methods, a derived model can be in various forms, such as a set of
classification rules (i.e., IF-THEN rules), a decision tree, a mathematical formula, or a learned neural
network (Fig. 1.2). A decision tree is a flowchart-like tree structure, where each node denotes a test
on an attribute value, each branch represents an outcome of the test, and tree leaves represent classes
or class distributions. Decision trees can easily be converted to classification rules. A neural network,
when used for classification, is typically a collection of neuron-like processing units with weighted
connections between the units. There are many other methods for constructing classification models,
such as naïve Bayesian classification, support vector machines, and k-nearest-neighbor classification.
Whereas classification predicts categorical (discrete, unordered) labels, regression models contin-
uous-valued functions. That is, regression is used to predict missing or unavailable numerical data
values rather than (discrete) class labels. The term prediction refers to both numeric prediction and class
label prediction. Regression analysis is a statistical methodology that is most often used for numeric
prediction, although other methods exist as well. Regression also encompasses the identification of
distribution trends based on the available data.
Classification and regression may need to be preceded by feature selection or relevance analysis,
which attempts to identify attributes (often called features) that are significantly relevant to the clas-
8 Chapter 1 Introduction

FIGURE 1.2
A classification model can be represented in various forms: (a) IF-THEN rules, (b) a decision tree, or (c) a neural
network.

sification and regression process. Such attributes will be selected for the classification and regression
process. Other attributes, which are irrelevant, can then be excluded from consideration.

Example 1.3. Classification and regression. Suppose a webstore sales manager wants to classify a
large set of items in the store, based on three kinds of responses to a sales campaign: good response,
mild response, and no response. You want to derive a model for each of these three classes based on the
descriptive features of the items, such as price, brand, place_made, type, and category. The resulting
classification should maximally distinguish each class from the others, presenting an organized picture
of the data set.
Suppose that the resulting classification is expressed as a decision tree. The decision tree, for in-
stance, may identify price as being the first important factor that best distinguishes the three classes.
Other features that help further distinguish objects of each class from one another include brand and
place_made. Such a decision tree may help the manager understand the impact of the given sales cam-
paign and design a more effective campaign in the future.
Suppose instead, that rather than predicting categorical response labels for each store item, you
would like to predict the amount of revenue that each item will generate during an upcoming sale,
based on the previous sales data. This is an example of regression analysis because the regression
model constructed will predict a continuous function (or ordered value.)
 1.4 Mining various kinds of knowledge 9

Chapters 6 and 7 discuss classification in further detail. Regression analysis is covered lightly in
these chapters since it is typically introduced in statistics courses. Sources for further information are
given in the bibliographic notes.

1.4.4 Cluster analysis

Unlike classification and regression, which analyze class-labeled (training) data sets, cluster analysis
(also called clustering) groups data objects without consulting class labels. In many cases, class-labeled
data may simply not exist at the beginning. Clustering can be used to generate class labels for a group of
data. The objects are clustered or grouped based on the principle of maximizing the intraclass similarity
and minimizing the interclass similarity. That is, clusters of objects are formed so that objects within a
cluster have high similarity in comparison to one another, but are rather dissimilar to objects in other
clusters. Each cluster so formed can be viewed as a class of objects, from which rules can be derived.
Clustering can also facilitate taxonomy formation, that is, the organization of observations into a
hierarchy of classes that group similar events together.
Example 1.4. Cluster analysis. Cluster analysis can be performed on the webstore customer data
to identify homogeneous subpopulations of customers. These clusters may represent individual target
groups for marketing. Fig. 1.3 shows a 2-D plot of customers with respect to customer locations in a
city. Three clusters of data points are evident.
Cluster analysis forms the topic of Chapters 8 and 9.

1.4.5 Deep learning

For many data mining tasks, such as classification and clustering, a key step often lies in finding “good
features,” which is a vector representation of each input data tuple. For example, in order to predict

FIGURE 1.3
A 2-D plot of customer data with respect to customer locations in a city, showing three data clusters.
10 Chapter 1 Introduction

whether a regional disease outbreak will occur, one might have collected a large number of features
from the health surveillance data, including the number of daily positive cases, number of daily tests,
number of daily hospitalization, etc. Traditionally, this step (called feature engineering) often heavily
relies on domain knowledge. Deep learning techniques provide an automatic way for feature engineer-
ing, which is capable of generating semantically meaningful features (e.g., weekly positive rate) from
the initial input features. The generated features often significantly improve the mining performance
(e.g., classification accuracy).
Deep learning is based on neural networks. A neural network is a set of connected input-output
units where each connection has a weight associated with it. During the learning phase, the network
learns by adjusting the weights to be able to predict the correct target values (e.g., class labels) of the
input tuples. The core algorithm to learn such weights is called backpropagation, which searches for
a set of weights and bias values that can model the data to minimize the loss function between the
network’s prediction and the actual target output of data tuples. Various forms (called architectures)
of neural networks have been developed, including feed-forward neural networks, convolutional neural
networks, recurrent neural networks, graph neural networks, and many more.
Deep learning has broad applications in computer vision, natural language processing, machine
translation, social network analysis, and so on. It has been used in a variety of data mining tasks,
including classification, clustering, outlier detection, and reinforcement learning.
Deep learning is the topic of Chapter 10.

1.4.6 Outlier analysis

A data set may contain objects that do not comply with the general behavior or model of the data.
These data objects are outliers. Many data mining methods discard outliers as noise or exceptions.
However, in some applications (e.g., fraud detection) the rare events can be more interesting than the
more regularly occurring ones. The analysis of outlier data is referred to as outlier analysis or anomaly
mining.
Outliers may be detected using statistical tests that assume a distribution or probability model for
the data, or using distance measures where objects that are remote from any other cluster are considered
outliers. Rather than using statistical or distance measures, density-based methods may identify outliers
in a local region, although they look normal from a global statistical distribution view.

Example 1.5. Outlier analysis. Outlier analysis may uncover fraudulent usage of credit cards by
detecting purchases of unusually large amounts for a given account number in comparison to regular
charges incurred by the same account. Outlier values may also be detected with respect to the locations
and types of purchase, or the purchase frequency.

Outlier analysis is discussed in Chapter 11.

1.4.7 Are all mining results interesting?

Data mining has the potential to generate a lot of results. A question can be, “Are all of the mining
results interesting?”
This is a great question. Each type of data mining functions has its own measures on the evaluation
of the mining quality. Nevertheless, there are some shared philosophy and principles.
 1.4 Mining various kinds of knowledge 11

Take pattern mining as an example. Pattern mining may generate thousands or even millions of
patterns, or rules. You may wonder, “What makes a pattern interesting? Can a data mining system
generate all of the interesting patterns? Or, can the system generate only the interesting ones?”
To answer the first question, a pattern is interesting if it is (1) easily understood by humans, (2)
valid on new or test data with some degree of certainty, (3) potentially useful, and (4) novel. A pattern
is also interesting if it validates a hypothesis that the user sought to confirm.
Several objective measures of pattern interestingness exist. These are based on the structure of
discovered patterns and the statistics underlying them. An objective measure for association rules of the
form X ⇒ Y is rule support, representing the percentage of transactions from a transaction database
that the given rule satisfies. This is taken to be the probability P (X ∪ Y ), where X ∪ Y indicates that a
transaction contains both X and Y , that is, the union of itemsets X and Y . Another objective measure for
association rules is confidence, which assesses the degree of certainty of the detected association. This
is taken to be the conditional probability P (Y |X), that is, the probability that a transaction containing
X also contains Y . More formally, support and confidence are defined as

support(X ⇒ Y ) = P (X ∪ Y ),
confidence(X ⇒ Y ) = P (Y |X).

In general, each interestingness measure is associated with a threshold, which may be controlled by
the user. For example, rules that do not satisfy a confidence threshold of, say, 50% can be considered
uninteresting. Rules below the threshold likely reflect noise, exceptions, or minority cases and are
probably of less value.
There are also other objective measures. For example, one may like set of items to be strongly
correlated in an association rule. We will discuss such measures in the corresponding chapter.
Although objective measures help identify interesting patterns, they are often insufficient unless
combined with subjective measures that reflect a particular user’s needs and interests. For example,
patterns describing the characteristics of customers who shop frequently online should be interesting
to the marketing manager, but may be of little interest to other analysts studying the same database
for patterns on employee performance. Furthermore, many patterns that are interesting by objective
standards may represent common sense and, therefore, are actually uninteresting.
Subjective interestingness measures are based on user beliefs in the data. These measures find
patterns interesting if the patterns are unexpected (contradicting a user’s belief) or offer strategic in-
formation on which the user can act. In the latter case, such patterns are referred to as actionable. For
example, patterns like “a large earthquake often follows a cluster of small quakes” may be highly ac-
tionable if users can act on the information to save lives. Patterns that are expected can be interesting
if they confirm a hypothesis that the user wishes to validate or they resemble a user’s hunch.
The second question—“Can a data mining system generate all of the interesting patterns?”—refers
to the completeness of a data mining algorithm. It is often unrealistic and inefficient for a pattern mining
system to generate all possible patterns since there could be a very large number of them. However, one
may also worry whether one may miss some important ones if the system stops short. To solve this
dilemma, user-provided constraints and interestingness measures should be used to focus the search.
With well-defined interesting measures and user-provided constraints, it is quite realistic to ensure the
completeness of pattern mining. The methods involved are examined in detail in Chapter 4.
Finally, the third question—“Can a data mining system generate only interesting patterns?”—is an
optimization problem in data mining. It is highly desirable for a data mining system to generate only
12 Chapter 1 Introduction

interesting patterns. This would be efficient for both the data mining system and the user because the
system may spend much less time to generate much fewer but interesting patterns, whereas the user
will not need to sift through a large number of patterns to identify the truly interesting ones. Constraint-
based pattern mining described in Chapter 5 is a good example in this direction.
Methods to assess the quality or interestingness of data mining results, and how to use them to
improve data mining efficiency, are discussed throughout the book.

1.5 Data mining: confluence of multiple disciplines

As a discipline that studies efficient and effective methods for uncovering patterns and knowledge
from various kinds of massive data sets for many applications, data mining naturally serves a conflu-
ence of multiple disciplines including machine learning, statistics, pattern recognition, natural language
processing, database technology, visualization and human computer interaction (HCI), algorithms,
high-performance computing, social sciences, and many application domains (Fig. 1.4). The interdis-
ciplinary nature of data mining research and development contributes significantly to the success of
data mining and its extensive applications. On the other hand, data mining is not only nurtured from the
knowledge and development of these disciplines, the dedicated research, development, and applications
of data mining on various kinds of big data may have substantially impacted the development of these
disciplines in recent years as well. In this section, we discuss several disciplines that strongly impact
and actively interact with the research, development, and applications of data mining.

1.5.1 Statistics and data mining

Statistics studies the collection, analysis, interpretation or explanation, and presentation of data. Data
mining has an inherent connection with statistics.
A statistical model is a set of mathematical functions that describe the behavior of the objects
in a target class in terms of random variables and their associated probability distributions. Statistical

FIGURE 1.4
Data mining: Confluence of multiple disciplines.
 1.5 Data mining: confluence of multiple disciplines 13

models are widely used to model data and data classes. For example, in data mining tasks such as data
characterization and classification, statistical models of target classes can be built. In other words, such
statistical models can be the outcome of a data mining task. Alternatively, data mining tasks can be
built on top of statistical models. For example, we can use statistics to model noise and missing data
values. Then, when mining patterns in a large data set, the data mining process can use the model to
help identify and handle noisy or missing values in the data.
Statistics research develops tools for prediction and forecasting using data and statistical models.
Statistical methods can be used to summarize or describe a collection of data. Basic statistical descrip-
tions of data are introduced in Chapter 2. Statistics is useful for mining various patterns from data and
for understanding the underlying mechanisms generating and affecting the patterns. Inferential statis-
tics (or predictive statistics) models data in a way that accounts for randomness and uncertainty in the
observations and is used to draw inferences about the process or population under investigation.
Statistical methods can also be used to verify data mining results. For example, after a classification
or prediction model is mined, the model should be verified by statistical hypothesis testing. A statis-
tical hypothesis test (sometimes called confirmatory data analysis) makes statistical decisions using
experimental data. A result is called statistically significant if it is unlikely to have occurred by chance.
If the classification or prediction model holds, then the descriptive statistics of the model increases the
soundness of the model.
Applying statistical methods in data mining is far from trivial. Often, a serious challenge is how to
scale up a statistical method over a large data set. Many statistical methods have high complexity in
computation. When such methods are applied on large data sets that are also distributed on multiple
logical or physical sites, algorithms should be carefully designed and tuned to reduce the computational
cost. This challenge becomes even tougher for online applications, such as online query suggestions in
search engines, where data mining is required to continuously handle fast, real-time data streams.
Data mining research has developed many scalable and effective solutions for the analysis of mas-
sive data sets and data streams. Moreover, different kinds of data sets and different applications may
require rather different analysis methods. Effective solutions have been proposed and tested, which
leads to many new, scalable data mining-based statistical analysis methods.

1.5.2 Machine learning and data mining

Machine learning investigates how computers can learn (or improve their performance) based on data.
Machine learning is a fast-growing discipline, with many new methodologies and applications devel-
oped in recent years, from support vector machines to probabilistic graphical models and deep learning,
which we will cover in this book.
In general, machine learning addresses two classical problems: supervised learning and unsuper-
vised learning.
• Supervised learning: A classic example of supervised learning is classification. The supervision in
the learning comes from the labeled examples in the training data set. For example, to automatically
recognize handwritten postal codes on mails, the learning system takes a set of handwritten postal
code images and their corresponding machine-readable translations as the training examples, and
learns (i.e., computes) a classification model.
• Unsupervised learning: A classic example of unsupervised learning is clustering. The learning pro-
cess is unsupervised since the input examples are not class-labeled. Typically, we may use clustering
14 Chapter 1 Introduction

to discover groups within the data. For example, an unsupervised learning method can take, as input,
a set of images of handwritten digits. Suppose that it finds 10 clusters of data. These clusters may
hopefully correspond to the 10 distinct digits of 0 to 9, respectively. However, since the training data
are not labeled, the learned model cannot tell us the semantic meaning of the clusters found.
As to these two basic problems, data mining and machine learning do share many similarities.
However, data mining differs from machine learning in several major aspects. First, even on similar
tasks like classification and clustering, data mining often works on very large data sets, or even on
infinite data streams, scalability can be an important concern, and many efficient and highly scalable
data mining algorithms or stream mining algorithms have to be developed to accomplish such tasks.
Second, in many data mining problems, the data sets are usually large, but the training data can still
be rather small since it is expensive for experts to provide quality labels for many examples. Therefore,
data mining has to put a lot of effort on developing weakly supervised methods. These include method-
ologies like semisupervised learning with a small set of labeled data but a large set of unlabeled data
(with the idea sketched in Fig. 1.5), integration or ensemble of multiple weak models obtained from
nonexperts (e.g., those obtained by crowd-sourcing), distant supervision, such as using popularly avail-
able and general (but distantly relevant to the problem to be solved) knowledge-bases (e.g., wikipedia,
DBPedia), actively learning by carefully selecting examples to ask human experts, or transfer learning
by integrating models learned from similar problem domains. Data mining has been extending such
weakly supervised methods for constructing quality classification models on large data sets with a very
limited set of high quality training data.

FIGURE 1.5
Semisupervised learning.
 1.5 Data mining: confluence of multiple disciplines 15

Third, machine learning methods may not be able to handle many kinds of knowledge discovery
problems on big data. On the other hand, data mining, developing effective solutions for concrete ap-
plication problems, goes deep in the problem domain, and expands far beyond the scope covered by
machine learning. For example, many application problems, such as business transaction data analysis,
software program execution sequence analysis, and chemical and biological structural analysis, need
effective methods for mining frequent patterns, sequential patterns, and structured patterns. Data min-
ing research has generated many scalable, effective, and diverse mining methods for such tasks. As
another example, the analysis of large-scale social and information networks poses many challenging
problems that may not fit the typical scope of many machine learning methods due to the information
interaction across links and nodes in such networks. Data mining has developed a lot of interesting
solutions to such problems.
From this point of view, data mining and machine learning are two different but closely related
disciplines. Data mining dives deep into concrete, data-intensive application domains, does not con-
fine itself to a single problem-solving methodology, and develops concrete (sometimes rather novel),
effective and scalable solutions for many challenging application problems. It is a young, broad, and
promising research discipline for many researchers and practitioners to study and work on.

1.5.3 Database technology and data mining

Database system research focuses on the creation, maintenance, and use of databases for organizations
and end-users. Particularly, database system researchers have established well-recognized principles in
data models, query languages, query processing and optimization, data storage, and indexing methods.
Database technology is well known for its scalability in processing very large, relatively structured data
sets.
Many data mining tasks need to handle large data sets or even real-time, fast streaming data. Data
mining can make good use of scalable database technologies to achieve high efficiency and scalability
on large data sets. Moreover, data mining tasks can be used to extend the capability of existing database
systems to satisfy users’ sophisticated data analysis requirements.
Recent database systems have built systematic data analysis capabilities on database data using data
warehousing and data mining facilities. A data warehouse integrates data originated from multiple
sources and various timeframes. It consolidates data in multidimensional space to form partially ma-
terialized data cubes. The data cube model not only facilitates online analytical processing (OLAP)
in multidimensional databases but also promotes multidimensional data mining, which will be further
discussed in future chapters.

1.5.4 Data mining and data science

With the tremendous amount of data in almost every discipline and various kinds of applications,
big data and data science have become buzzwords in recent years. Big data generally refers to huge
amounts of structured and unstructured data of various forms, and data science is an interdisciplinary
field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract knowledge and insights
from massive data of various forms. Clearly, data mining plays an essential role in data science.
For most people, data science is a concept that unifies statistics, machine learning, data mining,
and their related methods in order to understand and analyze massive data. It employs techniques and
theories drawn from many fields within the context of mathematics, statistics, information science, and
16 Chapter 1 Introduction

computer science. For many industry people, the term “data science” often refers to business analyt-
ics, business intelligence, predictive modeling, or any meaningful use of data, and is being taken as
a glamorized term to re-brand statistics, data mining, machine learning, or any kind of data analytics.
So far, there exists no consensus on a definition or suitable curriculum contents in data science degree
programs of many universities. Nonetheless, most universities take basic knowledge generated in statis-
tics, machine learning, data mining, database, and human computer interaction as the core curriculum
in data science education.
In 1990s, the late Turing award winner Jim Gray envisioned data science as the “fourth paradigm”
of science (i.e., from empirical to theoretical, computational, and now data-driven) and asserted that
“everything about science is changing because of the impact of information technology” and the emer-
gence of massive data. So there is no wonder that data science, big data, and data mining are closely
interrelated and represent an inevitable trend in science and technology developments.

1.5.5 Data mining and other disciplines

Besides statistics, machine learning, and database technology, data mining has close relationships with
many other disciplines as well.
The majority of the real-world data are unstructured, in the form of natural language text, images, or
audio-video data. Therefore, natural language processing, computer vision, pattern recognition, audio-
video signal processing, and information retrieval will offer critical help at handling such data. Actually,
handling any special kinds of data will need a lot of domain knowledge to be integrated into the data
mining algorithm design. For example, mining biomedical data will need the integration of knowledge
from biological sciences, medical sciences, and bioinformatics. Mining geospatial data will need much
knowledge and techniques from geography and geospatial data sciences. Mining software bugs in large
software programs will need to integrate software engineering with data mining. Mining social media
and social networks will need knowledge and skills from social sciences and network sciences. Such
examples can go on and on since data mining will penetrate almost every application domain.
One major challenge in data mining is efficiency and scalability since we often have to handle huge
amounts of data with critical time and resource constraints. Data mining is critically connected with
efficient algorithm design such as low-complexity, incremental, and streaming data mining algorithms.
It often needs to explore high performance computation, parallel computation, and distributed compu-
tation, with advanced hardware and cloud computing or cluster computing environment.
Data mining is also closely tied with human-computer interaction. Users need to interact with a
data mining system or process in an effective way, telling the system what to mine, how to incorporate
background knowledge, how to mine, and how to present the mining results in an easy-to-understand
(e.g., by interpretation and visualization) and easy-to-interact way (e.g., with friendly graphic user
interface and interactive mining).
Actually, nowadays, there are not only many interactive data mining systems but also many more
data mining functions hidden in various kinds of application programs. It is unrealistic to expect every-
one in our society to understand and master data mining techniques. It is also forbidden for industries
to expose their large data sets. Many systems have data mining functions built within so that people
can perform data mining or use data mining results simply by mouse clicking. For example, intelli-
gent search engines and online retails perform such invisible data mining by collecting their data and
user’s search or purchase history, incorporating data mining into their components to improve their per-
formance, functionality, and user satisfaction. When your grandma shops online, she may be surprised
 1.6 Data mining and applications 17

when receiving some smart recommendations. This could likely be resulted from such invisible data
mining.

1.6 Data mining and applications

Where there are data, there are data mining applications

As a highly application-driven discipline, data mining has seen great successes in many applications. It
is impossible to enumerate all applications where data mining plays a critical role. Presentations of data
mining in knowledge-intensive application domains, such as bioinformatics and software engineering,
require more in-depth treatment and are beyond the scope of this book. To demonstrate the importance
of applications of data mining, we briefly discuss a few highly successful and popular application
examples of data mining: business intelligence; search engines; social media and social networks; and
biology, medical science, and health care.

Business intelligence
It is critical for businesses to acquire a better understanding of the commercial context of their organiza-
tion, such as their customers, the market, supply and resources, and competitors. Business intelligence
(BI) technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Examples
include reporting, online analytical processing, business performance management, competitive intel-
ligence, benchmarking, and predictive analytics.
“How important is data mining in business intelligence?” Without data mining, many businesses
may not be able to perform effective market analysis, compare customer feedback on similar products,
discover the strengths and weaknesses of their competitors, retain highly valuable customers, and make
smart business decisions.
Clearly, data mining is the core of business intelligence. Online analytical processing tools in
business intelligence rely on data warehousing and multidimensional data mining. Classification and
prediction techniques are the core of predictive analytics in business intelligence, for which there are
many applications in analyzing markets, supplies, and sales. Moreover, clustering plays a central role
in customer relationship management, which groups customers based on their similarities. Using multi-
dimensional summarization techniques, we can better understand features of each customer group and
develop customized customer reward programs.

Web search engines

A Web search engine is a specialized computer server that searches for information on the Web. The
search results of a user query are often returned as a list (sometimes called hits). The hits may consist of
web pages, images, and other types of files. Some search engines also search and return data available in
public databases or open directories. Search engines differ from web directories in that web directories
are maintained by human editors, whereas search engines operate algorithmically or by a mixture of
algorithmic and human input.
Search engines pose grand challenges to data mining. First, they have to handle a huge and ever-
growing amount of data. Typically, such data cannot be processed using one or a few machines. Instead,
search engines often need to use computer clouds, which consist of thousands or even hundreds of thou-
18 Chapter 1 Introduction

sands of computers that collaboratively mine the huge amount of data. Scaling up data mining methods
over computer clouds and large distributed data sets is an area of active research and development.
Second, Web search engines often have to deal with online data. A search engine may be able to
afford constructing a model offline on huge datasets. To do this, it may construct a query classifier
that assigns a search query to predefined categories based on the query topic (i.e., whether the search
query “apple” is meant to retrieve information about a fruit or a brand of computers). Even if a model
is constructed offline, the adaptation of the model online must be fast enough to answer user queries in
real time.
Another challenge is maintaining and incrementally updating a model on fast-growing data streams.
For example, a query classifier may need to be incrementally maintained continuously since new queries
keep emerging and predefined categories and the data distribution may change. Most of the existing
model training methods are offline and static and thus cannot be used in such a scenario.
Third, Web search engines often have to deal with queries that are asked only a very small number
of times. Suppose a search engine wants to provide context-aware query recommendations. That is,
when a user poses a query, the search engine tries to infer the context of the query using the user’s
profile and his query history in order to return more customized answers within a small fraction of a
second. However, although the total number of queries asked can be huge, many queries may be asked
only once or a few times. Such severely skewed data are challenging for many data mining and machine
learning methods.

Social media and social networks

The prevalence of social media and social networks has fundamentally changed our life and the way
we exchange information and socialize nowadays. With tremendous amounts of social media and social
network data available, it is critical to analyze such data to extract actionable patterns and trends from
social media and social network data.
Social media mining is to sift through massive amounts of social media data (e.g., on social media
usage, online social behaviors, connections between individuals, online shopping behavior, content
exchange, etc.) in order to discern patterns and trends. These patterns and trends have been used for
social event detection, public health monitoring and surveillance, sentiment analysis in social media,
recommendation in social media, information provenance, social media trustability analysis, and social
spammer detection.
Social network mining is to investigate social network structures and the information associated
with such networks through the use of networks and graph theory and data mining methods. The social
network structures are characterized in terms of nodes (individual actors, people, or things within the
network) and the ties, edges, or links (relationships or interactions) that connect them. Examples of
social structures commonly visualized through social network analysis include social media networks,
memes spread, friendship and acquaintance networks, collaboration graphs, kinship, disease transmis-
sion, and sexual relationships. These networks are often visualized through sociograms in which nodes
are represented as points and ties are represented as lines.
Social network mining has been used to detect hidden communities, uncover the evolution and dy-
namics of social networks, compute network measures (e.g., centrality, transitivity, reciprocity, balance,
status, and similarity), analyze how information propagates in social media sites, measure and model
node/substructure influence and homophily, and conduct location-based social network analysis.
Social media mining and social network mining are important applications of data mining.
 1.8 Summary 19

Biology, medical science, and health care

Biology, medical science and health care have also been generating massive data at exponential scale.
Biomedical data take many forms, from “omics” to imaging, mobile health, and electronic health
records. With the availability of more efficient digital collection methods, biomedical scientists and
clinicians now find themselves confronting ever larger sets of data and trying to devise creative ways
to sift through this mountain of data and make sense of it. Indeed, data that used to be considered large
now seems small as the amount of data now being collected in a single day by an investigator can sur-
pass what might have been generated over his/her career even a decade ago. This deluge of biomedical
information requires new thinking about how data can be managed and analyzed to further scientific
understanding and for improving healthcare.
Biomedical data mining involves many challenging data mining tasks, including mining massive ge-
nomic and proteomic sequence data, mining frequent subgraph patterns for classifying biological data,
mining regulatory networks, characterization and prediction of protein-protein interactions, classifica-
tion and predictive analysis of medical images, biological text mining, biological information network
construction from biotext data, mining electronic health records, and mining biomedical networks.

1.7 Data mining and society

With data mining penetrating our everyday lives, it is important to study the impact of data mining
on society. How can we use data mining technology to benefit society? How can we guard against its
misuse? The improper disclosure or use of data and the potential violation of individual privacy and
data protection rights are areas of concern that need to be addressed.
Data mining will help scientific discovery, business management, economy recovery, and security
protection (e.g., the real-time discovery of intruders and cyberattacks). However, it also poses the risk
of unintentionally disclosing some confidential business or government information and disclosing an
individual’s personal information. Studies on data security in data mining and privacy-preserving data
publishing and data mining are important, ongoing research theme. The philosophy is to observe data
sensitivity and preserve data security and people’s privacy while performing successful data mining.
These issues and many additional ones relating to the research, development, and application of
data mining will be discussed throughout the book.

1.8 Summary
• Necessity is the mother of invention. With the mounting growth of data in every application, data
mining meets the imminent need for effective, scalable, and flexible data analysis in our society.
Data mining can be considered as a natural evolution of information technology and a confluence of
several related disciplines and application domains.
• Data mining is the process of discovering interesting patterns and knowledge from massive amounts
of data. As a knowledge discovery process, it typically involves data cleaning, data integration,
data selection, data transformation, pattern and model discovery, pattern or model evaluation, and
knowledge presentation.
20 Chapter 1 Introduction

• A pattern or model is interesting if it is valid on test data with some degree of certainty, novel,
potentially useful (e.g., can be acted on or validates a hunch about which the user was curious),
and easily understood by humans. Interesting patterns represent knowledge. Measures of pattern
interestingness, either objective or subjective, can be used to guide the discovery process.
• Data mining can be conducted on any kind of data as long as the data are meaningful for a target
application, such as structured data (e.g., relational database, transaction data) and unstructured data
(e.g., text and multimedia data), as well as data associated with different applications. Data can
also be categorized as stored vs. stream data, whereas the latter may need to explore special stream
mining algorithms.
• Data mining functionalities are used to specify the kinds of patterns or knowledge to be found
in data mining tasks. The functionalities include characterization and discrimination; the mining of
frequent patterns, associations, and correlations; classification and regression; deep learning; cluster
analysis; and outlier detection. As new types of data, new applications, and new analysis demands
continue to emerge, there is no doubt we will see more and more novel data mining tasks in the
future.
• Data mining, is a confluence of multiple disciplines but it has its unique research focus, dedicated to
many advanced applications. We study the close relationships of data mining with statistics, machine
learning, database technology, and many other disciplines.
• Data mining has many successful applications, such as business intelligence, Web search, bioinfor-
matics, health informatics, finance, digital libraries, and digital governments.
• Data mining may already have its strong impact on the society and the study of such impact, such
as how to ensure the effectiveness of data mining and in the meantime ensure the data privacy and
security, has become an important issue in research.

1.9 Exercises
1.1. What is data mining? In your answer, address the following:
a. Is it a simple transformation or application of technology developed from databases, statis-
tics, machine learning, and pattern recognition?
b. Someone believes that data mining is an inevitable result of the evolution of information
technology. If you are a database researcher, show data mining is resulted from a nature
evolution of database technology. What about if you are a machine learner researcher, or a
statistician?
c. Describe the steps involved in data mining when viewed as a process of knowledge discovery.
1.2. Define each of the following data mining functionalities: association and correlation analysis,
classification, regression, clustering, deep learning, and outlier analysis. Give examples of each
data mining functionality, using a real-life database that you are familiar with.
1.3. Present an example where data mining is crucial to the success of a business. What data mining
functionalities does this business need (e.g., think of the kinds of patterns that could be mined)?
Can such patterns be generated alternatively by data query processing or simple statistical analy-
sis?
1.4. Explain the difference and similarity between correlation analysis and classification, between clas-
sification and clustering, and between classification and regression.
 1.10 Bibliographic notes 21

1.5. Based on your observations, describe another possible kind of knowledge that needs to be dis-
covered by data mining methods but has not been listed in this chapter. Does it require a mining
methodology that is quite different from those outlined in this chapter?
1.6. Outliers are often discarded as noise. However, one person’s garbage could be another’s treasure.
For example, exceptions in credit card transactions can help us detect the fraudulent use of credit
cards. Using fraud detection as an example, propose two methods that can be used to detect outliers
and discuss which one is more reliable.
1.7. What are the major challenges of mining a huge amount of data (e.g., billions of tuples) in com-
parison with mining a small amount of data (e.g., data set of a few hundred tuples)?
1.8. Outline the major research challenges of data mining in one specific application domain, such as
stream/sensor data analysis, spatiotemporal data analysis, or bioinformatics.

1.10 Bibliographic notes

The book Knowledge Discovery in Databases, edited by Piatetsky-Shapiro and Frawley [PSF91], is
an early collection of research papers on knowledge discovery from data. The book Advances in
Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, edited by Fayyad, Piatetsky-Shapiro, Smyth, and Uthurusamy
[FPSSe96], is another early collection of research results on knowledge discovery and data mining.
There have been many data mining textbook or research books published since then. Some popular
ones include Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques (4th ed.) by Witten,
Frank, Hall and Pal [WFHP16]; Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques (3rd ed.) by Han and Kam-
ber and Pei [HKP11], Introduction to Data Mining (2nd ed.) by Tan, Steinbach, Karpatne, and Kumar
[TSKK18]; Data Mining: The Textbook [Agg15b]; Data Mining and Machine Learning: Fundamental
Concepts and Algorithms (2nd ed.) by Zaki and Meira [ZJ20]; Mining of Massive Datasets (3rd ed.)
by Leskovec, Rajaraman and Ullman [ZJ20]; The Elements of Statistical Learning (2nd ed.) by Hastie,
Tibshirani, and Friedman [HTF09]; Data Mining Techniques: For Marketing, Sales, and Customer
Relationship Management (3rd ed.) by Linoff and Berry [LB11]; Principles of Data Mining (Adap-
tive Computation and Machine Learning) by Hand, Mannila, and Smyth [HMS01]; Mining the Web:
Discovering Knowledge from Hypertext Data by Chakrabarti [Cha03]; Web Data Mining: Exploring
Hyperlinks, Contents, and Usage Data by Liu [Liu06]; and Data Mining: Multimedia, Soft Computing,
and Bioinformatics by Mitra and Acharya [MA03].
There are also numerous books that contain collections of papers or chapters on particular aspects of
knowledge discovery, such as cluster analysis, outlier detection, classification, association mining, and
mining particular kinds of data, such as mining text data, multimedia data, relational data, geospatial
data, social and information network data, and social media data. However, this list has gone very long
over the years and we will not list them individually. There are numerous tutorial notes on data mining
in major data mining, database, machine learning, statistics, and Web technology conferences.
KDNuggets is a regular electronic newsletter containing information relevant to knowledge dis-
covery and data mining, moderated by Piatetsky-Shapiro since 1991. The Internet site KDNuggets
(https://www.kdnuggets.com) contains a good collection of KDD-related information.
The data mining community started its first international conference on knowledge discovery and
data mining in 1995. The conference evolved from the four international workshops on knowledge
discovery in databases, held from 1989 to 1994. ACM-SIGKDD, a Special Interest Group on Knowl-
22 Chapter 1 Introduction

edge Discovery in Databases was set up under ACM in 1998 and has been organizing the international
conferences on knowledge discovery and data mining since 1999. IEEE Computer Science Society has
organized its annual data mining conference, International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), since
2001. SIAM (Society on Industrial and Applied Mathematics) has organized its annual data mining
conference, SIAM Data Mining Conference (SDM), since 2002. A dedicated journal, Data Mining and
Knowledge Discovery, published by Springer, has been available since 1997. An ACM journal, ACM
Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data, published its first volume in 2007.
ACM-SIGKDD also publishes a bi-annual newsletter, SIGKDD Explorations. There are a few
other international or regional conferences on data mining, such as the European Conference on Ma-
chine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECMLPKDD), the
Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD), and the International
Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM).
Research in data mining has also been popularly published in many textbooks, research books,
conferences, and journals on data mining, database, statistics, machine learning, and data visualization.