A Programmer’s Guide to Data Mining

Before you is a tool for learning basic data mining techniques. Most data mining textbooks focus on providing a theoretical foundation for data mining, and as result, may seem notoriously difficult to understand. Don’t get me wrong, the information in those books is extremely important. However, if you are a programmer interested in learning a bit about data mining you might be interested in a beginner’s hands-on guide as a first step.

That’s what this book provides. This guide follows a learn-by-doing approach. Instead of passively reading the book, I encourage you to work through the exercises and experiment with the Python code I provide. I hope you will be actively involved in trying out and programming data mining techniques. The textbook is laid out as a series of small steps that build on each other until, by the time you complete the book, you have laid the foundation for understanding data mining techniques.

You might think that systems like Pandora, Amazon’s recommendations, and automatic data mining for terrorists, must be very complex and the math behind the algorithms must be extremely complex requiring a PhD to understand. You might think the people who work on developing these systems are like rocket scientists. One goal I have for this book is to pull back this curtain of complexity and show some of the rudimentary methods involved.

Granted there are super-smart people at Google, the National Security Agency and elsewhere developing amazingly complex algorithms, but for the most part data mining relies on easy-to-understand principles. Before you start the book you might think data mining is pretty amazing stuff. By the end of the book, I hope you will be able to say nothing special.