The book consists of three sections. The first, foundations, provides a tutorial overview of the principles underlying data mining algorithms and their application. The presentation emphasizes intuition rather than rigor. The second section, data mining algorithms, shows how algorithms are constructed to solve specific problems in a principled manner. The algorithms covered include trees and rules for classification and regression, association rules, belief networks, classical statistical models, nonlinear models such as neural networks, and local memory-based models. The third section shows how all of the preceding analysis fits together when applied to real-world data mining problems. Topics include the role of metadata, how to handle missing data, and data preprocessing.
