Max Bramer is Emeritus Professor of Information Technology at the University of Portsmouth, England, Vice-President of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and Chair of the British Computer Society Specialist Group on Artificial Intelligence.

He has been actively involved since the 1980s in the field that has since come to be called by names such as Data Mining, Knowledge Discovery in Databases, Big Data and Predictive Analytics. He has carried out many projects in the field, particularly in relation to automatic classification of data, and has published extensively in the technical literature. He has taught the subject to both undergraduate and postgraduate students for many years.

Some of Max Bramer's other Springer publications include:

Research and Development in Intelligent Systems

Artificial Intelligence in Theory and Practice

Artificial Intelligence: an International Perspective

Web Programming with PHP and MySQL

Presents the principal techniques of data mining with particular emphasis on explaining and motivating the techniques used

Each topic is clearly explained, with a focus on algorithms not mathematical formalism, and is illustrated by detailed worked examples

Focuses on understanding of the basic algorithms and awareness of their strengths and weaknesses

Does not require a strong mathematical or statistical background

Useful as a textbook and also for self-study

Expanded fourth edition includes a detailed description of a feed-forward neural network with backpropagation and shows how it can be used for classification

Introduction to Data Mining.- Data for Data Mining.- Introduction to Classification: Naïve Bayes and Nearest Neighbour.- Using Decision Trees for Classification.- Decision Tree Induction: Using Entropy for Attribute Selection.- Decision Tree Induction: Using Frequency Tables for Attribute Selection.- Estimating the Predictive Accuracy of a Classifier.- Continuous Attributes.- Avoiding Overfitting of Decision Trees.- More About Entropy.- Inducing Modular Rules for Classification.- Measuring the Performance of a Classifier.- Dealing with Large Volumes of Data.- Ensemble Classification.- Comparing Classifiers.- Associate Rule Mining I.- Associate Rule Mining II.- Associate Rule Mining III.- Clustering.- Mining.- Classifying Streaming Data.- Classifying Streaming Data II: Time-dependent Data.- An Introduction to Neural Networks.- Appendix A - Essential Mathematics.- Appendix B - Datasets.- Appendix C - Sources of Further Information.- Appendix D - Glossary and Notation.- Appendix E - Solutions to Self-assessment Exercises.- Index.