Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques, Second Edition (Morgan... at Dominant Systems Book Store

"This book presents this new discipline in a very accessible form: both as a text to train the next generation of practitioners and researchers, and to inform lifelong learners like myself. Witten and Frank have a passion for simple and elegant solutions. They approach each topic with this mindset, grounding all concepts in concrete examples, and urging the reader to consider the simple techniques first, and then progress to the more sophisticated ones if the simple ones prove inadequate. If you have data that you want to analyze and understand, this book and the associated Weka toolkit are an excellent way to start."
- From the foreword by Jim Gray, Microsoft Research

"It covers cutting-edge, data mining technology that forward-looking organizations use to successfully tackle problems that are complex, highly dimensional, chaotic, non-stationary (changing over time), or plagued by. The writing style is well-rounded and engaging without subjectivity, hyperbole, or ambiguity. I consider this book a classic already!"
- Dr. Tilmann Bruckhaus, StickyMinds.com

Customer Reviews & Comments
I'm surprisingly please with this book. I've been reading up on the topic and associated algorithms in other books for some time; I'm a software developer but don't have a statistics background, and so felt a lot of the texts were too focused on the math and the theory while being thin on content when it came to "rubber hitting the road", or even using clear, simple examples and straight-forward notation. This book is so well-written that it communicates the concepts clearly, lucidly and in an organized fashion. The section that introduces Bayesian probability was drop-dead simple to follow. Quite frankly, having read a few other treatments on it, I can now say that everything else I read before this was overly complicated. Brevity is the soul of wit, no? To the reviewer who criticized the authors use of words to describe equations: This is what the authors intended to do. Would you fault them for writing in English if you wanted Greek? Not everyone who can benefit from applied data mining has the requisite background to understand the nitty gritty mathematics, nor should they have to, if they just want to understand the behavior and practical applications of the technology.

Back To Top