Customer comments on this selection.
 Good Overview of Data Mining and Analysis
This book is a relatively good survey of the main issues and concepts involved in data mining and analysis. It covers a wide breadth of material and does so in a fluid way, but I do have one gripe with it. The problem I have with this book is the level of detail on some subjects. I would say that this book is written for someone of an advanced undergraduate level to understand the concepts involved in data mining, even though someone with that degree would not have a serious position doing data mining. This perplexes me somewhat, because I somehow expected slightly more rigor in the way topics were covered in a data mining book. Not to the level of a math stat book, clearly, but still.
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br /In summary, there's a lot here about how data mining is done, but not a lot about how to mine data. Perhaps I expected the wrong things, or perhaps I expected too much, but that's my initial take on the book. If you're looking for depth and detail you won't find it here, but if you want a thorough introduction to data mining, and I do mean only an introduction, this text definitely will serve you well.
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br /Again, don't misunderstand, this text definitely has it's value. It gives you a lot of information about the basics of data mining under a variety of circumstances (variable types, for example ordinal vs. nominal vs. ratio and so forth) and how to approach the analysis in each case. It mainly centers on the univariate case and seems to only touch briefly on multivariate models (which, in practice, are usually the norm).
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br /As stated, for an introduction to the process, concepts and main issue of data mining and predictive modeling, this text is absolutely fine. I just think it needs to be made more clear what the target audience is for this text. I'm not saying I was disappointed, because there is much to learn in this book even for the practicing statistician, but I would argue that I expected more, based on the description.
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br /Even so, 4 stars for the good quality of the writing, the breadth of coverage and the layout of the book. This should be required reading for those entering (or thinking about entering) the field of quantitative analysis and modeling.
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