Foreword

Recent developments of computer technology and the requirements of various applications have led to the increase in the volume and complexity of data. This makes manual analysis of such data very difficult. Data mining helps in automatic extraction of hidden predictive information from these data using other techniques like neural networks, decision trees, genetic algorithms and support vector machines. Some of the applications of data mining are predicting the trend of an industry based on the behaviors of customers, multifactor dimensionality reduction to detect the interaction of genes, condition monitoring of electrical equipments, surveillance, psychological and social network analysis.

Data mining tools also help in integrating all medical information from different systems, databases. Thus they provide physicians with certain information which are sometimes not provided by certain clinical decision support tools. Powerful information extraction tools have been developed to collect, retain and analyze the huge volume of data which is being transferred by people in the world. This can largely help a government in finding suspicious data linkages and patterns to control terrorist activities. Data mining tools provide engineers with the knowledge obtained from maintenance of products. This knowledge can be either obtained from the designers' own experiences or from the resources in their organization. This knowledge can help the engineers to design new products without the defects of old products. Data mining in Bioinformatics helps in finding motifs in sequences to predict folding patterns, to discover genetic mechanisms responsible for a disease, to decide the rules for multiple DNA or protein sequences etc. Biological Knowledge Discovery from Databases (BIOKDD) plays a significant role in analyzing the data and in solving emerging problems.

The objective of this book is to introduce the reader to recent research activities in the field of data mining. This book covers areas like association mining, classification, mobile marketing, opinion mining, microarray data mining, internet mining and applications of data mining on biological data, telecommunication and distributed databases. This book would be very helpful in understanding and implementation of data mining techniques in emerging domains.

This book will be very useful to researchers, engineers, scientists and individuals working in the field of data mining. This book would enable the readers to work on new research domains in data mining which would be useful for the society.

C. Swaminathan

Vice Chancellor

Bharathiar University, India

C. Swaminathan known well for his institution-building abilities and keen interest in the field of higher education, was born to Thiru. A. Chinnappan and Thirumathi C. Ponnammal at Thingalur near Erode, Tamilnadu, India. Coming from a family of farmers, he had his schooling at Thingalur GovernmentHSS. He then went on to do his B.A. at C. N. College, Erode and M.A. at Pachaiappa's College, Chennai. Continuing his studies, he obtained M.Phil. from the University of Madras after which he took up a faculty position as Lecturer in History at CBM College, Coimbatore in 1980. The researcher in him would make no allowance for any rest inspite of a demanding teaching career and he went on to get his Ph.D. in 2000.