The ability to analyze and understand massive data sets lags far behind the ability to gather and store the data. To meet this challenge, knowledge discovery and data mining (KDD) is growing rapidly as an emerging field. However, no matter how powerful computers are now or will be in the future, KDD researchers and practitioners must consider how to manage ever-growing data which is, ironically, due to the extensive use of computers and ease of data collection with computers. Many different approaches have been used to address the data explosion issue, such as algorithm scale-up and data...

There is a broad interest in feature extraction, construction, and selection among practitioners from statistics, pattern recognition, and data mining to machine learning. Data pre-processing is an essential step in the knowledge discovery process for real-world applications. This book compiles contributions from many leading and active researchers in this growing field and paints a picture of the state-of-the-art techniques that can boost the capabilities of many existing data mining tools. The objective of this collection is to increase the awareness of the data mining community about...

As computer power grows and data collection technologies advance, a plethora of data is generated in almost every field where computers are used. The com- puter generated data should be analyzed by computers; without the aid of computing technologies, it is certain that huge amounts of data collected will not ever be examined, let alone be used to our advantages. Even with today's advanced computer technologies (e. g., machine learning and data mining sys- tems), discovering knowledge from data can still be fiendishly hard due to the characteristics of the computer generated data. Taking its...