The increasing volume of data in modern business and science calls for more complex and sophisticated tools. Although advances in data mining technology have made extensive data collection much easier, it's still always evolving and there is a constant need for new techniques and tools that can help us transform this data into useful information and knowledge. Since the previous edition's publication, great advances have been made in the field of data mining. Not only does the third of edition of Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques continue the tradition of equipping you with an understanding and application of the theory and practice of discovering patterns hidden in large data sets, it also focuses on new, important topics in the field: data warehouses and data cube technology, mining stream, mining social networks, and mining spatial, multimedia and other complex data. Each chapter is a stand-alone guide to a critical topic, presenting proven algorithms and sound implementations ready to be used directly or with strategic modification against live data. This is the resource you need if you want to apply today's most powerful data mining techniques to meet real business challenges. * Presents dozens of algorithms and implementation examples, all in pseudo-code and suitable for use in real-world, large-scale data mining projects. * Addresses advanced topics such as mining object-relational databases, spatial databases, multimedia databases, time-series databases, text databases, the World Wide Web, and applications in several fields. *Provides a comprehensive, practical look at the concepts and techniques you need to get the most out of real business data

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Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Machine learning

Presents a review of 200 references in content-based image retrieval. The paper starts with discussing the working conditions of content-based retrieval: patterns of use, types of pictures, the role of semantics, and the sensory gap. Subsequent sections discuss computational steps for image retrieval systems. Step one of the review is image processing for retrieval sorted by color, texture, and local geometry. Features for retrieval are discussed next, sorted by: accumulative and global features, salient points, object and shape features, signs, and structural combinations thereof. Similarity of pictures and objects in pictures is reviewed for each of the feature types, in close connection to the types and means of feedback the user of the systems is capable of giving by interaction. We briefly discuss aspects of system engineering: databases, system architecture, and evaluation. In the concluding section, we present our view on: the driving force of the field, the heritage from computer vision, the influence on computer vision, the role of similarity and of interaction, the need for databases, the problem of evaluation, and the role of the semantic gap.

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Content-based image retrieval at the end of the early years

The growing interest in data mining is motivated by a common problem across disciplines: how does one store, access, model, and ultimately describe and understand very large data sets? Historically, different aspects of data mining have been addressed independently by different disciplines. This is the first truly interdisciplinary text on data mining, blending the contributions of information science, computer science, and statistics. 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.

Principles of data mining

We have witnessed great interest and a wealth of promise in content-based image retrieval as an emerging technology. While the last decade laid foundation to such promise, it also paved the way for a large number of new techniques and systems, got many new people involved, and triggered stronger association of weakly related fields. In this article, we survey almost 300 key theoretical and empirical contributions in the current decade related to image retrieval and automatic image annotation, and in the process discuss the spawning of related subfields. We also discuss significant challenges involved in the adaptation of existing image retrieval techniques to build systems that can be useful in the real world. In retrospect of what has been achieved so far, we also conjecture what the future may hold for image retrieval research.

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Image retrieval: Ideas, influences, and trends of the new age

A very promising idea for fast searching in traditional and multimedia databases is to map objects into points in k-d space, using k feature-extraction functions, provided by a domain expert [25]. Thus, we can subsequently use highly fine-tuned spatial access methods (SAMs), to answer several types of queries, including the 'Query By Example' type (which translates to a range query); the 'all pairs' query (which translates to a spatial join [8]); the nearest-neighbor or best-match query, etc.However, designing feature extraction functions can be hard. It is relatively easier for a domain expert to assess the similarity/distance of two objects. Given only the distance information though, it is not obvious how to map objects into points.This is exactly the topic of this paper. We describe a fast algorithm to map objects into points in some k-dimensional space (k is user-defined), such that the dis-similarities are preserved. There are two benefits from this mapping: (a) efficient retrieval, in conjunction with a SAM, as discussed before and (b) visualization and data-mining: the objects can now be plotted as points in 2-d or 3-d space, revealing potential clusters, correlations among attributes and other regularities that data-mining is looking for.We introduce an older method from pattern recognition, namely, Multi-Dimensional Scaling (MDS) [51]; although unsuitable for indexing, we use it as yardstick for our method. Then, we propose a much faster algorithm to solve the problem in hand, while in addition it allows for indexing. Experiments on real and synthetic data indeed show that the proposed algorithm is significantly faster than MDS, (being linear, as opposed to quadratic, on the database size N), while it manages to preserve distances and the overall structure of the data-set.

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FastMap: a fast algorithm for indexing, data-mining and visualization of traditional and multimedia datasets

We introduce a new model of similarity of time sequences that captures the intuitive notion that two sequences should be considered similar if they have enough non-overlapping time-ordered pairs of subsequences thar are similar. The model allows the amplitude of one of the two sequences to be scaled by any suitable amount and its offset adjusted appropriately. Two subsequences are considered similar if one can be enclosed within an envelope of a specified width drawn around the other. The model also allows non-matching gaps in the matching subsequences. The matching subsequences need not be aligned along the time axis. Given this model of similarity, we present fast search techniques for discovering all similar sequences in a set of sequences. These techniques can also be used to find all (sub)sequences similar to a given sequence. We applied this matching system to the U.S. mutual funds data and discovered interesting matches.

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Fast Similarity Search in the Presence of Noise, Scaling, and Translation in Time-Series Databases

We consider the problem of finding rules relating patterns in a time series to other patterns in that series, or patterns in one series to patterns in another series A simple example is a rule such as "a period of low telephone call activity is usually followed by a sharp rise in call volume" Examples of rules relating two or more time series are "if the Microsoft stock price goes up and Intel falls, then IBM goes up the next day," and "if Microsoft goes up strongly for one day, then declines strongly on the next day, and on the same days Intel stays about level, then IBM stays about level" Our emphasis is in the discovery of local patterns in multivariate time series, in contrast to traditional time series analysis which largely focuses on global models Thus, we search for rules whose conditions refer to patterns in time series However, we do not want to define beforehand which patterns are to be used; rather, we want the patterns to be formed from the data in the context of rule discovery We describe adaptive methods for finding rules of the above type from time-series data The methods are based on discretizing the sequence by methods resembling vector quantization We first form subsequences by sliding a window through the time series, and then cluster these subsequences by using a suitable measure of time-series similarity The discretized version of the time series is obtained by taking the cluster identifiers corresponding to the subsequence Once the time-series is discretized, we use simple rule finding methods to obtain rules from the sequence We present empirical results on the behavior of the method

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Rule discovery from time series

We propose a file structure to index high-dimensionality data, which are typically points in some feature space. The idea is to use only a few of the features, using additional features only when the additional discriminatory power is absolutely necessary. We present in detail the design of our tree structure and the associated algorithms that handle such "varying length" feature vectors. Finally, we report simulation results, comparing the proposed structure with the R*-tree, which is one of the most successful methods for low-dimensionality spaces. The results illustrate the superiority of our method, which saves up to 80% in disk accesses.

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The TV-tree: an index structure for high-dimensional data

The Reverse Nearest Neighbor (RNN) problem is to find all points in a given data set whose nearest neighbor is a given query point. Just like the Nearest Neighbor (NN) queries, the RNN queries appear in many practical situations such as marketing and resource management. Thus, efficient methods for the RNN queries in databases are required. The paper introduces a new index structure, the Rdnn-tree, that answers both RNN and NN queries efficiently. A single index structure is employed for a dynamic database, in contrast to the use of multiple indexes in previous work. This leads to significant savings in dynamically maintaining the index structure. The Rdnn-tree outperforms existing methods in various aspects. Experiments on both synthetic and real world data show that our index structure outperforms previous methods by a significant margin (more than 90% in terms of number of leaf nodes accessed) in RNN queries. It also shows improvement in NN queries over standard techniques. Furthermore, performance in insertion and deletion is significantly enhanced by the ability to combine multiple queries (NN and RNN) in one traversal of the tree. These facts make our index structure extremely preferable in both static and dynamic cases.

King-Ip Lin

Papers

FastMap: a fast algorithm for indexing, data-mining and visualization of traditional and multimedia datasets

Fast Similarity Search in the Presence of Noise, Scaling, and Translation in Time-Series Databases

Rule discovery from time series

The TV-tree: an index structure for high-dimensional data

An index structure for efficient reverse nearest neighbor queries