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Data mining

45 Citations•1999•
C. Olaru, L. Wehenkel
IEEE Computer Applications in Power

This tutorial presents the concept of data mining and aims at providing an understanding of the overall process and tools involved: how the process turns out, what can be done with it, what are the main techniques behind it, and which are the operational aspects.

Abstract

Data mining (DM) is a folkloric denomination of a complex activity that aims at extracting synthesized and previously unknown information from large databases. It denotes also a multidisciplinary field of research and development of algorithms and software environments to support this activity in the context of real-life problems where often huge amounts of data are available for mining. There is a lot of publicity in this field and also different ways to see the things. Hence, depending on the viewpoints, DM is sometimes considered as just a step in a broader overall process called knowledge discovery in databases (KDD), or as a synonym of the latter. This tutorial presents the concept of data mining and aims at providing an understanding of the overall process and tools involved: how the process turns out, what can be done with it, what are the main techniques behind it, and which are the operational aspects. The tutorial also describes a few examples of data mining applications, so as to motivate the power system field as a very opportune data mining application.