Scientific Data Mining

A presentation of how data mining can be used to address the modern problem of data overload in science and engineering domains. This book will be useful for data mining practitioners, students learning about data analysis techniques and scientists interested in the application of data mining techniques to their data.

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Technological advances are enabling scientists to collect vast amounts of data in fields such as medicine, remote sensing, astronomy, and high-energy physics. These data arise not only from experiments and observations, but also from computer simulations of complex phenomena. As a result, it has become impractical to manually analyze and understand the data. This book describes how techniques from the multi-disciplinary field of data mining can be used to address the modern problem of data overload in science and engineering domains. Starting with a survey of analysis problems in different applications, it identifies the common themes across these domains and uses them to define an end-to-end process of scientific data mining. This multi-step process includes tasks such as processing the raw image or mesh data to identify objects of interest; extracting relevant features describing the objects; detecting patterns among the objects; and displaying the patterns for validation by the scientists.