Data Mining: Know It All

Chapter 5. Algorithms: The Basic Methods

Now that we’ve seen how the inputs and outputs can be represented, it's time to look at the learning algorithms themselves. This chapter explains the basic ideas behind the techniques that are used in practical data mining. We will not delve too deeply into the trickier issues—advanced versions of the algorithms, optimizations that are possible, complications that arise in practice.

In this chapter we look at the basic ideas. One of the most instructive lessons is that simple ideas often work very well, and we strongly recommend the adoption of a “simplicity-first” methodology when analyzing practical datasets. There are many different kinds of simple structure that datasets can exhibit. In one dataset, ...