Data Mining: A Tutorial Based Primer [With CD-ROM]

by Richard Roiger and Michael Geatz

This primer on data mining provides an introduction to the principles and techniques for extracting information from a business-minded perspective. A basic familiarity with the field of data mining... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0201741288
• ISBN13: 9780201741285
• Release Date: October 2002
• Publisher: Pearson
• Length: 408 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 7.4" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

A very good choice for learning data mining concepts with minimal resources

The particularity of this book is that it is more accessible to read than most of data mining books, which in general require some maths/statistics/computing background. The book is not written in the best way from the point of view of a data mining expert, as for instance sometimes a theme is recurrent in the text, but it is not obvious to explain data mining concepts using minimal previous knowledge in computing/maths/statistics. A second important positive aspect is that the book comes with a software (IDA) running under Excel, which can be used to illustrate the techniques presented in the book (BTW a new version of the software is freely available to download, regularly). This is not the case with most of the data mining books. So if you wish to learn the basics of data mining with minimal or no previous resources (good maths/computing background and access to expensive data mining software) then this is a very good choice.

Overall, a very good hands-on book for learning data mining

The book does a good job covering basic data mining terminology and concepts, and provides introductory, but still subtantial coverage of the most common data mining methods.Positives: a trial version of the easy-to-use Excel-based iDA tool is included with the book, which allows the reader to reproduce the examples (very helpful for understanding the text). iDA may also be used to complete many of the well thought out exercises provided at the end of each chapter. Working with the hands-on examples and exercises is an excellent way to learn data mining, and due to this, the book provides unique and excellent value.Negatives: the order of topics and chapters seems rather disorganized; topics are often (surprisingly) repeated and the overall structure of the book doesn't seem to make sense at times. But if you read each chapter more or less independently, this isn't a serious problem. The iDA tool that comes with the text is a trial, 180-day version, and it is unlikely that the average reader will want to spend $5,000 to purchase a license for the commercial product after the six month trial is up. So you should buy the book knowing ahead of time that after a while, the iDA tool will no longer be available to go back over the examples or exercises.

Unique approach and many insights

Using an Excel-based tool to provide a hands-on approach, this book covers diverse areas in data mining from statistical patterns to data warehousing to the semantic web. Easy to read and with many insights.