Scientific Data Mining

Chandrika Kamath 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.

Advances in technology are making massive data sets common in many scientific disciplines, such as astronomy, medical imaging, bio-informatics, combinatorial chemistry, remote sensing, and physics. To find useful information in these data sets, scientists and engineers are turning to data mining techniques. This book is a collection of papers based on the first two in a series of workshops on mining scientific datasets. It illustrates the diversity of problems and application areas that can benefit from data mining, as well as the issues and challenges that differentiate scientific data mining from its commercial counterpart. While the focus of the book is on mining scientific data, the work is of broader interest as many of the techniques can be applied equally well to data arising in business and web applications. Audience: This work would be an excellent text for students and researchers who are familiar with the basic principles of data mining and want to learn more about the application of data mining to their problem in science or engineering.

Mohamed Medhat Gaber “It is not my aim to surprise or shock you – but the simplest way I can summarise is to say that there are now in the world machines that think, that learn and that create. Moreover, their ability to do these things is going to increase rapidly until – in a visible future – the range of problems they can handle will be coextensive with the range to which the human mind has been applied” by Herbert A. Simon (1916-2001) 1Overview This book suits both graduate students and researchers with a focus on discovering knowledge from scienti c data. The use of computational power for data analysis and knowledge discovery in scienti c disciplines has found its roots with the re- lution of high-performance computing systems. Computational science in physics, chemistry, and biology represents the rst step towards automation of data analysis tasks. The rational behind the developmentof computationalscience in different - eas was automating mathematical operations performed in those areas. There was no attention paid to the scienti c discovery process. Automated Scienti c Disc- ery (ASD) [1–3] represents the second natural step. ASD attempted to automate the process of theory discovery supported by studies in philosophy of science and cognitive sciences. Although early research articles have shown great successes, the area has not evolved due to many reasons. The most important reason was the lack of interaction between scientists and the automating systems.

Chandrika Kamath 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.

Activities in data warehousing and mining are constantly emerging. Data mining methods, algorithms, online analytical processes, data mart and practical issues consistently evolve, providing a challenge for professionals in the field. Research and Trends in Data Mining Technologies and Applications focuses on the integration between the fields of data warehousing and data mining, with emphasis on the applicability to real-world problems. This book provides an international perspective, highlighting solutions to some of researchers' toughest challenges. Developments in the knowledge discovery process, data models, structures, and design serve as answers and solutions to these emerging challenges.

This timely book identifies and highlights the latest data mining paradigms to analyze, combine, integrate, model and simulate vast amounts of heterogeneous multi-modal, multi-scale data for emerging real-world applications in life science.The cutting-edge topics presented include bio-surveillance, disease outbreak detection, high throughput bioimaging, drug screening, predictive toxicology, biosensors, and the integration of macro-scale bio-surveillance and environmental data with micro-scale biological data for personalized medicine. This collection of works from leading researchers in the field offers readers an exceptional start in these areas.

Clinical Data-Mining (CDM) involves the conceptualization, extraction, analysis, and interpretation of available clinical data for practice knowledge-building, clinical decision-making and practitioner reflection. Depending upon the type of data mined, CDM can be qualitative or quantitative; it is generally retrospective, but may be meaningfully combined with original data collection.Any research method that relies on the contents of case records or information systems data inevitably has limitations, but with proper safeguards these can be minimized. Among CDM's strengths however, are that it is unobtrusive, inexpensive, presents little risk to research subjects, and is ethically compatible with practitioner value commitments. When conducted by practitioners, CDM yields conceptual as well as data-driven insight into their own practice- and program-generated questions.This pocket guide, from a seasoned practice-based researcher, covers all the basics of conducting practitioner-initiated CDM studies or CDM doctoral dissertations, drawing extensively on published CDM studies and completed CDM dissertations from multiple social work settings in the United States, Australia, Israel, Hong Kong and the United Kingdom. In addition, it describes consulting principles for researchers interested in forging collaborative university-agency CDM partnerships, making it a practical tool for novice practitioner-researchers and veteran academic-researchers alike.As such, this book is an exceptional guide both for professionals conducting practice-based research as well as for social work faculty seeking an evidence-informed approach to practice-research integration.

This book reviews the latest techniques in exploratory data mining (EDM) for the analysis of data in the social and behavioral sciences to help researchers assess the predictive value of different combinations of variables in large data sets. Methodological findings and conceptual models that explain reliable EDM techniques for predicting and understanding various risk mechanisms are integrated throughout. Numerous examples illustrate the use of these techniques in practice. Contributors provide insight through hands-on experiences with their own use of EDM techniques in various settings. Readers are also introduced to the most popular EDM software programs. A related website at http://mephisto.unige.ch/pub/edm-book-supplement/offers color versions of the book’s figures, a supplemental paper to chapter 3, and R commands for some chapters. The results of EDM analyses can be perilous – they are often taken as predictions with little regard for cross-validating the results. This carelessness can be catastrophic in terms of money lost or patients misdiagnosed. This book addresses these concerns and advocates for the development of checks and balances for EDM analyses. Both the promises and the perils of EDM are addressed. Editors McArdle and Ritschard taught the "Exploratory Data Mining" Advanced Training Institute of the American Psychological Association (APA). All contributors are top researchers from the US and Europe. Organized into two parts--methodology and applications, the techniques covered include decision, regression, and SEM tree models, growth mixture modeling, and time based categorical sequential analysis. Some of the applications of EDM (and the corresponding data) explored include: selection to college based on risky prior academic profiles the decline of cognitive abilities in older persons global perceptions of stress in adulthood predicting mortality from demographics and cognitive abilities risk factors during pregnancy and the impact on neonatal development Intended as a reference for researchers, methodologists, and advanced students in the social and behavioral sciences including psychology, sociology, business, econometrics, and medicine, interested in learning to apply the latest exploratory data mining techniques. Prerequisites include a basic class in statistics.