Data mining and knowledge discovery (DMKD) is a rapidly expanding field in computer science. It has become very important because of an increased demand for methodologies and tools that can help the analysis and understanding of huge amounts of data generated on a daily basis by institutions like hospitals, research laboratories, banks, insurance companies, and retail stores and by Internet users. This explosion is a result of the growing use of electronic media. But what is data mining (DM)? A Web search using the Google search engine retrieves many (really many) definitions of data mining....