Multi-Relational Data Mining

Book excerpt: With the increased possibilities in modern society for companies and institutions to gather data cheaply and efficiently, the subject of Data Mining has become of increasing importance. This interest has inspired a rapidly maturing research field with developments both on a theoretical, as well as on a practical level with the availability of a range of commercial tools. Unfortunately, the widespread application of this technology has been limited by an important assumption in mainstream Data Mining approaches. This assumption – all data resides, or can be made to reside, in a single table – prevents the use of these Data Mining tools in certain important domains, or requires considerable massaging and altering of the data as a pre-processing step. This limitation has spawned a relatively recent interest in richer Data Mining paradigms that do allow structured data as opposed to the traditional flat representation. This publication goes into the different uses of Data Mining, with Multi-Relational Data Mining (MRDM), the approach to Structured Data Mining, as the main subject of this book.