1

Introduction

This book is an introduction to the young and fast-growing field of data mining (also known
as knowledge 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, you will learn why data mining is
in high demand and how it is part of the natural evolution of information technology.
Section 1.2 defines data mining with respect to the knowledge discovery process. Next,
you will learn about data mining from many 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 kinds of
technologies to be used (Section 1.5), and targeted applications (Section 1.6). In this
way, you will gain a multidimensional view of data mining. Finally, Section 1.7 outlines
major data mining research and development issues.

1.1

Why Data Mining?

Necessity, who is the mother of invention. Plato
We live in a world where vast amounts of data are collected daily. Analyzing such data
is an important need. Section 1.1.1 looks at how data mining can meet this need by
providing tools to discover knowledge from data. In Section 1.1.2, we observe how data
mining can be viewed as a result of the natural evolution of information technology.

1.1.1

Moving toward the Information Age

We are living in the information age is a popular saying; however, we are actually living
in the data age. Terabytes or petabytes1 of data pour into our computer networks, the
World Wide Web (WWW), and various data storage devices every day from business,
1A

petabyte is a unit of information or computer storage equal to 1 quadrillion bytes, or a thousand

terabytes, or 1 million gigabytes.
Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques
c 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1 Introduction

society, science and 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 data collection and storage tools.
Businesses worldwide generate gigantic data sets, including sales transactions, stock
trading records, product descriptions, sales promotions, company profiles and performance, and customer feedback. For example, large stores, such as Wal-Mart, handle
hundreds of millions of transactions per week at thousands of branches around the
world. Scientific and engineering practices generate high orders of petabytes of data in
a continuous manner, from remote sensing, process measuring, scientific experiments,
system performance, engineering observations, and environment surveillance.
Global backbone telecommunication networks carry tens of petabytes of data traffic
every day. The medical and health industry generates tremendous amounts of data from
medical records, patient monitoring, and medical imaging. Billions of Web searches
supported by search engines process tens of petabytes of data daily. Communities and
social media have become increasingly important data sources, producing digital pictures and videos, blogs, Web communities, and various kinds of social networks. The
list of sources that generate huge amounts of data is endless.
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.
The field is young, dynamic, and promising. Data mining has 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 hundreds of millions of queries every day. Each query can be viewed
as a transaction where the user describes her or his information need. 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, Googles 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 traditional systems can.2 This example shows how data mining can turn a large
collection of data into knowledge that can help meet a current global challenge.

1.1.2

Data Mining as the Evolution of Information Technology

Data mining can be viewed as a result of the natural evolution of information technology. The database and data management industry evolved in the development of
2 This

is reported in [GMP+ 09].

1.1 Why Data Mining?

Data Collection and Database Creation

(1960s and earlier)
Primitive file processing
Database Management Systems
(1970s to early 1980s)
Hierarchical and network database systems
Relational database systems
Data modeling: entity-relationship models, etc.
Indexing and accessing methods
Query languages: SQL, etc.
User interfaces, forms, and reports
Query processing and optimization
Transactions, concurrency control, and recovery
Online transaction processing (OLTP)
Advanced Database Systems
(mid-1980s to present)
Advanced data models: extended-relational,
object relational, deductive, etc.
Managing complex data: spatial, temporal,
multimedia, sequence and structured,
scientific, engineering, moving objects, etc.
Data streams and cyber-physical data systems
Web-based databases (XML, semantic web)
Managing uncertain data and data cleaning
Integration of heterogeneous sources
Text database systems and integration with
information retrieval
Extremely large data management
Database system tuning and adaptive systems
Advanced queries: ranking, skyline, etc.
Cloud computing and parallel data processing
Issues of data privacy and security

Advanced Data Analysis

(late-1980s to present)
Data warehouse and OLAP
Data mining and knowledge discovery:
classification, clustering, outlier analysis,
association and correlation, comparative
summary, discrimination analysis, pattern
discovery, trend and deviation analysis, etc.
Mining complex types of data: streams,
sequence, text, spatial, temporal, multimedia,
Web, networks, etc.
Data mining applications: business, society,
retail, banking, telecommunications, science
and engineering, blogs, daily life, etc.
Data mining and society: invisible data
mining, privacy-preserving data mining,
mining social and information networks,
recommender systems, etc.

Future Generation of Information Systems

(Present to future)

Figure 1.1 The evolution of database system technology.

several critical functionalities (Figure 1.1): data collection and database creation, data
management (including data storage and retrieval and database transaction processing),
and advanced data analysis (involving data warehousing and data mining). The early
development of data collection and database creation mechanisms served as a prerequisite for the later development of effective mechanisms for data storage and retrieval,
as well as query and transaction processing. Nowadays numerous database systems
offer query and transaction processing as common practice. Advanced data analysis has
naturally become the next step.

Chapter 1 Introduction

Since the 1960s, database and information technology has evolved systematically
from primitive file processing systems to sophisticated and powerful database systems.
The research and development in database systems since the 1970s progressed from
early hierarchical and network database systems to relational database systems (where
data are stored in relational table structures; see Section 1.3.1), data modeling tools,
and indexing and accessing methods. In addition, users gained convenient and flexible
data access through query languages, user interfaces, query optimization, and transaction management. Efficient methods for online transaction processing (OLTP), where a
query is viewed as a read-only transaction, contributed substantially to the evolution and
wide acceptance of relational technology as a major tool for efficient storage, retrieval,
and management of large amounts of data.
After the establishment of database management systems, database technology
moved toward the development of advanced database systems, data warehousing, and
data mining for advanced data analysis and web-based databases. Advanced database
systems, for example, resulted from an upsurge of research from the mid-1980s onward.
These systems incorporate new and powerful data models such as extended-relational,
object-oriented, object-relational, and deductive models. Application-oriented database
systems have flourished, including spatial, temporal, multimedia, active, stream and
sensor, scientific and engineering databases, knowledge bases, and office information
bases. Issues related to the distribution, diversification, and sharing of data have been
studied extensively.
Advanced data analysis sprang up from the late 1980s onward. The steady and
dazzling progress of computer hardware technology in the past three decades led to
large supplies of powerful and affordable computers, data collection equipment, and
storage media. This technology provides a great boost to the database and information
industry, and it enables a huge number of databases and information repositories to be
available for transaction management, information retrieval, and data analysis. Data
can now be stored in many different kinds of databases and information repositories.
One emerging data repository architecture is the data warehouse (Section 1.3.2).
This is a repository of multiple heterogeneous data sources organized under a unified schema at a single site to facilitate management decision making. Data warehouse
technology includes data cleaning, data integration, and online analytical processing
(OLAP)that is, analysis techniques with functionalities such as summarization, consolidation, and aggregation, as well as the ability to view information from different
angles. Although OLAP tools support multidimensional analysis and decision making,
additional data analysis tools are required for in-depth analysisfor example, data mining tools that provide data classification, clustering, outlier/anomaly detection, and the
characterization of changes in data over time.
Huge volumes of data have been accumulated beyond databases and data warehouses. During the 1990s, the World Wide Web and web-based databases (e.g., XML
databases) began to appear. Internet-based global information bases, such as the WWW
and various kinds of interconnected, heterogeneous databases, have emerged and play
a vital role in the information industry. The effective and efficient analysis of data from
such different forms of data by integration of information retrieval, data mining, and
information network analysis technologies is a challenging task.

1.2 What Is Data Mining?

How can I analyze these data?

Figure 1.2 The world is data rich but information poor.

In summary, the abundance of data, coupled with the need for powerful data analysis
tools, has been described as a data rich but information poor situation (Figure 1.2). The
fast-growing, tremendous amount of data, collected and stored in large and numerous
data repositories, has far exceeded our human ability for comprehension without powerful tools. As a result, data collected in large data repositories become data tombsdata
archives that are seldom visited. Consequently, important decisions are often made
based not on the information-rich data stored in data repositories but rather on a decision makers intuition, simply because the decision maker does not have the tools to
extract the valuable knowledge embedded in the vast amounts of data. Efforts have
been made to develop expert system and knowledge-based technologies, which typically
rely on users or domain experts to manually input knowledge into knowledge bases.
Unfortunately, however, the manual knowledge input procedure is prone to biases and
errors and is extremely costly and time consuming. The widening gap between data and
information calls for the systematic development of data mining tools that can turn data
tombs into golden nuggets of knowledge.

1.2

What Is Data Mining?

It is no surprise that data mining, as a truly interdisciplinary subject, can be defined
in many different ways. Even the term data mining does not really present all the major
components in the picture. 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

Chapter 1 Introduction

Knowledge

Figure 1.3 Data miningsearching for knowledge (interesting patterns) in data.

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. Nevertheless, mining is a vivid term characterizing
the process that finds a small set of precious nuggets from a great deal of raw material
(Figure 1.3). Thus, such a misnomer carrying both data and mining became a popular choice. In addition, many other terms have a similar meaning to data miningfor
example, knowledge mining from data, knowledge extraction, data/pattern analysis, data
archaeology, and data dredging.
Many people treat data mining as a synonym for another popularly used term,
knowledge discovery from data, or KDD, while others view data mining as merely an
essential step in the process of knowledge discovery. The knowledge discovery process is
shown in Figure 1.4 as an iterative sequence of the following steps:
1. Data cleaning (to remove noise and inconsistent data)
2. Data integration (where multiple data sources may be combined)3

3A

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.