Encyclopedia of Data Warehousing and Mining [Hardcover]

John Wang (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1591405572 | ISBN-13: 978-1591405573 | Publication Date: July 8, 2005

The Encyclopedia of Data Warehousing and Mining provides a comprehensive, critical and descriptive examination of concepts, issues, trends, and challenges in this rapidly expanding field of data warehousing and mining (DWM). This encyclopedia consists of more than 350 contributors from 32 countries, 1,800 terms and definitions, and more than 4,400 references. This authoritative publication offers in-depth coverage of evolutions, theories, methodologies, functionalities, and applications of DWM in such interdisciplinary industries as healthcare informatics, artificial intelligence, financial modeling, and applied statistics, making it a single source of knowledge and latest discoveries in the field of DWM.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

John Wang, Ph.D., is a full professor in the Department of Information and Decision Sciences at Montclair State University (MSU), USA. Professor Wang has published 88 refereed papers and three books. He is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Cases on Electronic Commerce and has been a guest editor and referee for Operations Research, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, and many other highly prestigious journals. His long-term research goal is on the synergy of Operations Research, Data Mining and Cybernetics.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 1348 pages
• Publisher: Idea Group Publishing (July 8, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1591405572
• ISBN-13: 978-1591405573
• Product Dimensions: 11.3 x 8.7 x 3.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,143,654 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Useful for gaining entry into the literature, December 3, 2005

By 

theskeptic "theskeptic" (Jersey) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Encyclopedia of Data Warehousing and Mining (Hardcover)

I'm not entirely sure why I'm bothering to write this review, since at $500, only corporate and academic libraries can afford to buy this set of books.

Well, anyway, it's hard to rate a book like this. It's not really an encyclopedia, despite the title. It's more like a crash-course on the state-of-the-art in a variety of fields. If you are a graduate student or an engineer who rapidly needs to find out what's going on in the field of, say, association rule learning or fuzzy clustering or unsupervised discretization or microarray mining, this is a good place to start. You can probably find an article here on your topic of interest, and that article will probably have references to the recent important papers in the field (although the references may be skewed toward publications by the article's author and his colleagues.) I obtained these books from my university's library and I found them to be a quick way to track down a bunch of recent papers on the topics I was interested in. However, beyond providing these references, I can't say that the actual articles in the collection are very helpful... they are generally very short, and in the few cases where they actually contain any substance, it is often a condensed version of the author's own work. (There are some exceptions.)

With regard to the design of the book(s), they could have done a lot better. The consistency of the articles varies pretty widely (which probably can't be helped), but the type-setting and editing also leave something to be desired; in many cases, equations and graphics do not look professionally typeset. The organization of the articles is perplexing at best. The articles are arranged alphabetically by title, but the titles do not seem to have undergone any editorial review. Therefore we end up with "Microarray Data Mining" on p.728 and "Mining Microarray Data" on p.810, separated by 14 other articles. There are a large number of other examples like this, as well as a substantial number of titles that begin with "Data Mining..." or "Mining...," which makes the alphabetical organization of the book fairly unhelpful. There are no cross-references between articles, and the index is also very weak, since it only indexes words that appear in the "key terms" section of each article. Therefore, in order to find all the articles on your topic of interest, your only real recourse is to scan through the entire table of contents. (It seems that in our modern era of fully-searchable online documents, people are forgetting some important aspects of making usable printed reference books.)

Finally, the copy that I obtained (which was probably just recently purchased by the library) has one page which is not at all attached to the binding. It was not ripped out -- it was just never attached. I have never seen this with any other book at any price (let alone in the $500 range!). I don't know what kind of binding operation they used on this, but I think that a $500 book set should come with all the pages attached.