FORUM: Perspectives on data mining
Niall M. Adams
Imperial College London
Introduction
To begin a discussion of data mining (DM) it is instructive to provide a couple of textbook definitions. According to Hand et al.(2001), data mining is ‘the analysis of (often large) observational data sets to find unsuspected relationships and to summarize the data in novel ways that are both understandable and useful to the data owner’. Witten and Frank (2005), authors of the public domain data mining software WEKA, say that DM is ‘the extraction of implicit, previously unknown, and potentially useful information from data’. These...