During the last decade, we have seen an explosive growth in our capabilities to both generate and collect data. Advances in data collection, widespread use of bar codes for most commercial products, and the computerization of many business and government transactions have flooded us with information, and generated an urgent need for new techniques and tools that can intelligently and automatically assist us in transforming this data into useful knowledge.

This book examines and describes many such new techniques and tools, in the emerging field of data mining and knowledge discovery in databases (KDD). The chapters of this book, organized into eight sections, span fundamental issues of knowledge discovery, classification and clustering, trend and deviation analysis, dependency derivation, integrated discovery systems, augmented database systems, and application case studies.