Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques, 3rd Edition

1.3 What Kinds of Data Can Be Mined?

As a general technology, data mining can be applied to any kind of data as long as the data are meaningful for a target application. The most basic forms of data for mining applications are database data (Section 1.3.1), data warehouse data (Section 1.3.2), and transactional data (Section 1.3.3). The concepts and techniques presented in this book focus on such data. Data mining can also be applied to other forms of data (e.g., data streams, ordered/sequence data, graph or networked data, spatial data, text data, multimedia data, and the WWW). We present an overview of such data in Section 1.3.4. Techniques for mining of these kinds of data are briefly introduced in Chapter 13. In-depth treatment is considered ...