This book explores the concepts and techniques of data mining, a promising and flourishing frontier in data and information systems and their applications. Data mining, also popularly referred to as knowledge discovery from data (KDD), is the automated or convenient extraction of patterns representing knowledge implicitly stored or captured in large databases, data warehouses, the Web, other massive information repositories, or data streams. Data mining is a multidisciplinary field, drawing work from areas including database technology, machine learning, statistics, pattern recognition, information retrieval, neural networks, knowledge-based systems, artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, and data visualization.