This book focuses on one of the major challenges of the newly created scientific domain known as data science: turning data into actionable knowledge in order to exploit increasing data volumes and deal with their inherent complexity. Actionable knowledge has been qualitatively and intensively studied in management, business, and the social sciences but in computer science and engineering, its connection has only recently been established to data mining and its evolution, ‘Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining’ (KDD). Data mining seeks to extract interesting patterns from data, but,...

This book presents the outcome of the European project "SERENA", involving fourteen partners as international academics, technological companies, and industrial factories, addressing the design and development of a plug-n-play end-to-end cloud architecture, and enabling predictive maintenance of industrial equipment to be easily exploitable by small and medium manufacturing companies with a very limited data analytics experience. Perspectives and new opportunities to address open issues on predictive maintenance conclude the book with some interesting suggestions of future research...