This book explores a proactive and domain-driven method to classification tasks. This novel proactive approach to data mining not only induces a model for predicting or explaining a phenomenon, but also utilizes specific problem/domain knowledge to suggest specific actions to achieve optimal changes in the value of the target attribute. In particular, the authors suggest a specific implementation of the domain-driven proactive approach for classification trees. The book centers on the core idea of moving observations from one branch of the tree to another. It introduces a novel splitting criterion for decision trees, termed maximal-utility, which maximizes the potential for enhancing profitability in the output tree. Two real-world case studies, one of a leading wireless operator and the other of a major security company, are also included and demonstrate how applying the proactive approach to classification tasks can solve business problems. Proactive Data Mining with Decision Trees is intended for researchers, practitioners and advanced-level students.

Decision trees have become one of the most powerful and popular approaches in knowledge discovery and data mining; it is the science of exploring large and complex bodies of data in order to discover useful patterns. Decision tree learning continues to evolve over time. Existing methods are constantly being improved and new methods introduced.This 2nd Edition is dedicated entirely to the field of decision trees in data mining; to cover all aspects of this important technique, as well as improved or new methods and techniques developed after the publication of our first edition. In this new edition, all chapters have been revised and new topics brought in. New topics include Cost-Sensitive Active Learning, Learning with Uncertain and Imbalanced Data, Using Decision Trees beyond Classification Tasks, Privacy Preserving Decision Tree Learning, Lessons Learned from Comparative Studies, and Learning Decision Trees for Big Data. A walk-through guide to existing open-source data mining software is also included in this edition.This book invites readers to explore the many benefits in data mining that decision trees offer:

This is the first comprehensive book dedicated entirely to the field of decision trees in data mining and covers all aspects of this important technique.Decision trees have become one of the most powerful and popular approaches in knowledge discovery and data mining, the science and technology of exploring large and complex bodies of data in order to discover useful patterns. The area is of great importance because it enables modeling and knowledge extraction from the abundance of data available. Both theoreticians and practitioners are continually seeking techniques to make the process more efficient, cost-effective and accurate. Decision trees, originally implemented in decision theory and statistics, are highly effective tools in other areas such as data mining, text mining, information extraction, machine learning, and pattern recognition. This book invites readers to explore the many benefits in data mining that decision trees offer:

This book presents a unified framework, based on specialized evolutionary algorithms, for the global induction of various types of classification and regression trees from data. The resulting univariate or oblique trees are significantly smaller than those produced by standard top-down methods, an aspect that is critical for the interpretation of mined patterns by domain analysts. The approach presented here is extremely flexible and can easily be adapted to specific data mining applications, e.g. cost-sensitive model trees for financial data or multi-test trees for gene expression data. The global induction can be efficiently applied to large-scale data without the need for extraordinary resources. With a simple GPU-based acceleration, datasets composed of millions of instances can be mined in minutes. In the event that the size of the datasets makes the fastest memory computing impossible, the Spark-based implementation on computer clusters, which offers impressive fault tolerance and scalability potential, can be applied.

Decision Trees for Analytics Using SAS Enterprise Miner is the most comprehensive treatment of decision tree theory, use, and applications available in one easy-to-access place. This book illustrates the application and operation of decision trees in business intelligence, data mining, business analytics, prediction, and knowledge discovery. It explains in detail the use of decision trees as a data mining technique and how this technique complements and supplements data mining approaches such as regression, as well as other business intelligence applications that incorporate tabular reports, OLAP, or multidimensional cubes. An expanded and enhanced release of Decision Trees for Business Intelligence and Data Mining Using SAS Enterprise Miner, this book adds up-to-date treatments of boosting and high-performance forest approaches and rule induction. There is a dedicated section on the most recent findings related to bias reduction in variable selection. It provides an exhaustive treatment of the end-to-end process of decision tree construction and the respective considerations and algorithms, and it includes discussions of key issues in decision tree practice. Analysts who have an introductory understanding of data mining and who are looking for a more advanced, in-depth look at the theory and methods of a decision tree approach to business intelligence and data mining will benefit from this book.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Machine Learning and Data Mining in Pattern Recognition, MLDM 2016, held in New York, NY, USA in July 2016. The 58 regular papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 169 submissions. The topics range from theoretical topics for classification, clustering, association rule and pattern mining to specific data mining methods for the different multimedia data types such as image mining, text mining, video mining and Web mining.

This book is to chart the progress in applying machine learning, including deep learning, to a broad range of image analysis and pattern recognition problems and applications. In this book, we have assembled original research articles making unique contributions to the theory, methodology and applications of machine learning in image analysis and pattern recognition.