New to data mining: book recommendation?

cvh

Good day all,

Can anyone recommend a book(s) for someone totally new to data mining? I'm looking for something relatively basic, I would think.

Thank you.

wessel

Machine Learning,  Tom Mitchell, McGraw Hill, 1997.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom/mlbook.html

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning Christopher M. Bishop
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/cmbishop/prml/

Both books have ebooks online

cvh

Many thanks, wessel.

MartinKoch

Hi,

I can recommend the Book "Data Mining - Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques" from Ian H. Witten and Eibe Frank.

IMHO this book gives a good practical introduction to data mining. The authors are developing the data mining program Weka which can also be utilised by RapidMiner. So you can most likely use all data mining methods which are described in the book from your RM.

wessel

This book is also available as ebook.

This book can be very confusing because not everything is explained.
Be sure to ask questions if you don't understand parts of it.

For example, they mention MDL, minimal description length, for pruning trees, but they do go trough any theory on MDL.

sprocketonline

Without a doubt, the best introductory book I've read regarding data mining is Toby Segaran's 'Programming Collective Intelligence''.  The examples are in Python, but are simple while covering all the necessary. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=fEsZ3Ey-Hq4C&lpg=PP1&dq=programming%20collective%20intelligence&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false