This book is an outgrowth of data mining courses at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG); the RPI course has been offered every Fall since 1998, whereas the UFMG course has been offered since 2002. Although there are several good books on data mining and related topics, we felt that many of them are either too high-level or too advanced. Our goa…
The book is organized in a modular fashion. After reading Part One, the other parts can be read in a number of possible sequences. Figure 0.1a shows the bottom-up approach provided by reading the book from front to back. With this approach, each part builds on the material in the previous part, so that it is always clear how a given layer of functionality is supported from below. There is more …