| Abstract | The current explosion of data and information, which are mainly caused by the continuous adoption of data warehouses and the extensive use of the Internet and its related technologies, has increased the urgent need for the development of techniques for intelligent data analysis. Data mining, which concerns the discovery and extraction of knowledge chunks from large data repositories, addresses this need. Data mining automates the discovery of hidden patterns and relationships that may not always be obvious. Data mining tools include classification techniques (such as decision trees, rule induction programs and neural networks) (Kou et al., 2007); clustering algorithms and association rule approaches, amongst others. |
|---|
