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xxviii Preface HAN 05-pref-xxiii-xxx-9780123814791 2011/6/1 3:35 Page xxviii #6

book or handbook, should you later decide to perform in-depth research in the related
fields or pursue a career in data mining.
What do you need to know to read this book?

You should have some knowledge of the concepts and terminology associated with
statistics, database systems, and machine learning. However, we do try to provide
enough background of the basics, so that if you are not so familiar with these fields
or your memory is a bit rusty, you will not have trouble following the discussions in
the book.
You should have some programming experience. In particular, you should be able to
read pseudocode and understand simple data structures such as multidimensional
arrays.

To the Professional

This book was designed to cover a wide range of topics in the data mining field. As a
result, it is an excellent handbook on the subject. Because each chapter is designed to be
as standalone as possible, you can focus on the topics that most interest you. The book
can be used by application programmers and information service managers who wish
to learn about the key ideas of data mining on their own. The book would also be useful
for technical data analysis staff in banking, insurance, medicine, and retailing industries
who are interested in applying data mining solutions to their businesses. Moreover, the
book may serve as a comprehensive survey of the data mining field, which may also
benefit researchers who would like to advance the state-of-the-art in data mining and
extend the scope of data mining applications.
The techniques and algorithms presented are of practical utility. Rather than selecting
algorithms that perform well on small “toy” data sets, the algorithms described in the
book are geared for the discovery of patterns and knowledge hidden in large, real data
sets. Algorithms presented in the book are illustrated in pseudocode. The pseudocode
is similar to the C programming language, yet is designed so that it should be easy to
follow by programmers unfamiliar with C or C++. If you wish to implement any of the
algorithms, you should find the translation of our pseudocode into the programming
language of your choice to be a fairly straightforward task.

Book Web Sites with Resources
The book has a web site at www.cs.uiuc.edu/∼hanj/bk3 and another with Morgan Kauf-
mann Publishers at www.booksite.mkp.com/datamining3e. These web sites contain many
supplemental materials for readers of this book or anyone else with an interest in data
mining. The resources include the following:

Slide presentations for each chapter. Lecture notes in Microsoft PowerPoint slides
are available for each chapter.