Data mining is an interdisciplinary research area spanning several disciplines such as database systems, machine learning, intelligent information systems, statistics, and expert systems. Data mining has evolved into an important and active area of research because of theoretical challenges and practical applications associated with the problem of discovering (or extracting) interesting and previously unknown knowledge from very large real-world databases. Many aspects of data mining have been

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... nvestigated in several related elds. But the problem is unique enough that there is a great need to extend these studies to include the nature of the contents of the real-world databases. In this chapter, we discuss the theory and foundational issues in data mining, describe data mining methods and algorithms, and review data mining applications. Since a major focus of this book is on rough sets and its applications to database mining, one full section is devoted to summarizing the state of rough sets as related to data mining of real-world databases. More importantly, we p r o vide evidence showing that the theory of rough sets constitutes a sound basis for data mining applications.