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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NEURAL NETWORKS, VOL. 9, NO.

6, NOVEMBER 1998

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Book Reviews
Data Mining Methods for Knowledge DiscoveryK. J. Cios, W. Pedrycz, and R. M. Swiniarski. (Boston, MA: Kluwer, 1998, 520 pp., ISBN 0-7923-8252-8). Reviewed by Vojislav Kecman. This original introductory and pioneering book is organized around the highly signicant concept of knowledge discovery from data. In an information age when gigabytes of information are produced daily one cannot use that amount of data. Instead one is forced to mine through data in order to reveal new knowledge from huge databases. Exactly this is the topic of this nice innovating volumemine the data intelligently, extract the relevant new information smartly, discover new fragments of truth and increase the knowledge. Simple to state, but very hard to achieve. Cios et al. produced the book that may ease these highly difcult tasks. In order to achieve this, they have made a respectable attempt to make the selection of topics and techniques both modern and applicable in the best sense. Therefore, this volume includes discussion of basic data mining (DM) approachesrough set theories, Bayesian classication methods, fuzzy sets, machine learning, and neural networks, to name just a few of the most relevant. This is a theoretically strongly grounded introduction to methods and techniques that are frequently used in the process of knowledge discovery. There are many different stages in mining the data and extracting knowledge. The book presents different approaches, techniques, and methods and consists of a Foreword, Preface, and nine chapters as follows: 1. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (22 p.), 2. Rough Sets (51 p.), 3. Fuzzy Sets (58 p.), 4. Bayesian Methods (62 p.), 5. Evolutionary Computing (36 p.), 6. Machine Learning (80 p.), 7. Neural Networks (66 p.), 8. Clustering (56 p.), and 9. Preprocessing (60 p.) followed by a detailed Index section. We deliberately stated the number of pages devoted to each chapter in order to give a sense of the authors balanced approach to each particular set of techniques and approaches. Chapter 1 on Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery introduces this broad eld in detail and includes the topics such as dening knowledge discovery (KD), architecture of KD, knowledge representation, basic models and DM, main features of KD process; it presents several representative examples of KD systems. It is an important chapter that denes the books research domain and agenda. It stresses the need to bridge the widening the gap between the data generation and data comprehension. Finally, because the DM and KD are multidisciplinary elds indeed, the rst chapter sets the frame for presentation of different methodologies comprised in that broad eld. Chapter 2 is devoted to the basic description of the theory of Rough Sets and it is equipped with many nice examples that should facilitate the understanding of this important set of techniques for revealing important structures in data and to classify complex objects. This theory deals with classes and categories that cannot be distinguished in terms of the available attributes. They can only be roughly, or approximately, dened. In mining huge data sets this approach is more than welcomed and rough sets denitely constitute foundation of DM. Newcomers will appreciate plenty of examples that will denitely help in understanding this relatively novel methodology.
The reviewer is with the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Publisher Item Identier S 1045-9227(98)09348-5.

Chapter 3 introduces Fuzzy Sets Theory and shows all relevant concepts in this powerful approach to embedding human structured knowledge into reliable modeling tool. All the important concepts (included fuzzy sets, vagueness, membership functions, relations, norms, fuzzy inference, fuzzy set operations, entropy and energy measure of fuzziness, and probability and fuzzy sets) are presented by using precise mathematical notation. This makes the chapter invaluable source of basic models for prospective designers of fuzzy models. We feel that a few graphs are missing in illustrating and explaining some of basic concepts such as different membership functions, support, alpha-cut, normal set, operations of concentration, dilatation etc. The previous sentence is written having in mind beginners in the eld. At the same time, we are sure that more experienced researcher will like those neatly written pages on all relevant fuzzy concepts. Chapter 4 describes the Bayesian Methods in data processing and classication tasks. To our understanding these pieces of classical theory are an indispensable part of any book on DM and KD. The concepts of two- and multi-category classication, features, loss, risk, decision regions, discriminant functions and estimation are basic theoretical concepts for the whole eld of DM. In performing the DM tasks we generally miss the basic assumption of the Bayes theoryknowledge of probability distributions. This is not the reason to abandon this approach. On the contrary, sound understanding of this theory helps during data mining. Supported and equipped with Bayesian approach, we do perform mining tasks with much more condence. This is a nicely written chapter that nishes with exposition of probabilistic neural networks. In Chapter 5 the authors present the basics of a new nonlinear optimization paradigm of Evolutionary Computing. [In fact, the chapter describes both genetic algorithms (GA) and evolutionary computing (EC).] These techniques may be well adopted in the framework of DM for their general approach in solving optimization problems. GA and EC are global optimization algorithms that imitate the mechanisms of natural evolution. They employ a parallel yet randomized multipoint search strategy that work towards reinforcing search selections of high tness while minimizing some error function. Note, that this error function does not necessarily has to be differentiable, what is strict requirement for learning in neural networks. Therefore, GA and EC are capable of solving complex combinatorial and organizational problems that arise in DM and which classical approaches nd inconceivable. Chapter 6 on Machine Learning addresses major issues of interest in machine learning. The chapter covers the supervised inductive machine learning of concepts from data and it continues with the review of decision rule algorithms and decision three algorithms. Those are the two major approaches to inductive machine learning. Furthermore, the authors examine in detail hybrid algorithm that combines both approaches. It also covers the topic of overtting that is of interest to all learning algorithms. In the chapter the authors stress the need of proper testing of ML algorithms and introduce and compare two basic methods for testing. The chapter ends in example that applies the presented techniques to coronary artery disease data. This is a slightly larger chapter due to this extended example that skillfully presents several of the DM approaches in diagnosing coronary artery disease from images of human heart. This

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NEURAL NETWORKS, VOL. 9, NO. 6, NOVEMBER 1998

chapter is also a proper introduction to the broad and important eld of machine learning that constitutes a different learning paradigm for functional approximation and classication than the one using neural networks. Chapter 7 is concerned with Neural Networks, a powerful learning and modeling tool. It describes basic learning paradigms and NN designed around them. These approaches are the supervised, unsupervised, and their combinations. All three methods may well be applied in DM and KD tasks. The chapter begins with basic concepts of articial neuron and learning rules and it continues with presentation of radial basis function (RBF) networks. RBF networks are most prominent representatives of supervised NN. Besides they are equal, or at least very similar, to a large class of fuzzy models. The authors righteously exploit these facts and present the RBFs with care they deserve by providing several examples with many pictures. Furthermore, they describe the Kohonens self organizing map (SOM) network as one of the most used networks that recover the unknown dependencies through unsupervised learning. Chapter also presents and illustrates the image recognition NN that is representative of a hybrid, supervised-unsupervised, learning. Chapter 8 investigates various aspects, concepts and approaches to Clustering that is one of the pillars of data mining. Clustering is a broad name for grouping data techniques according to some similarity measure. Several different techniques for data clustering are presented. In particular, two clustering algorithms developed inside the fuzzy set theories are analyzed. In this way one enables closer designer interaction during the clustering procedure. The chapter ends with application of fuzzy clustering techniques to three different data sets, which nicely illustrates the capabilities of proposed clustering algorithms. In the nal chapter, Chapter 9, the authors address the questions of Preprocessing of data. The chapter rst discusses basic characteristics of patterns and features and introduces elementary preprocessing operations. We particularly appreciate that the principal component analysis is included and presented in details. Together with various clustering algorithms this technique is in foundation of raw data

preprocessing and it is aimed to feature extraction and reduction. Faced with large and generally high-dimensional feature vectors, this capacity of our DM tool will always be highly appreciated. The Fishers linear discriminant and transformation are also presented. This nal chapter ends with a nice presentation of a numerical experiment for texture image classication that applied and compared three feature extraction and reduction techniquessingular value decomposition and two variants of principal component analysis method. Finally, it is worthy of noting that each chapter contains a summary and an exercise section containing a set of problems that extend the basic concepts and aim to sharpen the readers skill. A distinctive feature of this volume is also that each chapter comes with an extensive bibliography that provides a reliable list of good references. We are aware that the newcomers and cautious beginners in the eld will nd this list very useful. The book Data Mining Methods for Knowledge Discovery is aimed at the senior undergraduate and graduate students, and should also prove very useful for a broad audience of researchers, practicing engineers and professionals in computer and information sciences, biomedical informatics, and business information systems willing to deepen their understanding of this broad subject. The theory and practice of the data mining and knowledge discovery is a large eld and it is almost impossible to cover all of the questions and open problems in a single volume. Writing a book aimed to do that is a risky endeavor but, somehow, the authors produced an excellent volume that did cover almost the whole vast area of DM and KD. Without a doubt, the most relevant pieces of tools, methods, and approaches are covered in detail andwe would saywith elegance. We are not aware of a single general, broadly accepted set of techniques for DM and KD. Therefore, any serious attempt to address these vast issues must be welcomed and being such an attempt this book deserves all credit. There is no doubt that this precious pioneering volume will be both the reliable guide and the very useful source of information for all interested in the elds of data mining and knowledge discovery.

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