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Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques

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 Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and
Techniques with Java Implementations
b y / a n H. Witten a n d Eibe F r a n k

M o r g a n K a u f m a n n Publishers, 2 0 0 0
416 pages, Paper, $ 4 9 . 9 5
I S B N 1-.55860-552-5

R e v i e w by:
James Geller, N e w Jersey Institute of T e c h n o l o g y
CS D e p a r t m e n t , 323 Dr. King Blvd., N e w a r k , NJ 07 t 0 2
geller@oak.njit.edu
http:Hweb, n j i t . e d u / - g e l l e r /

Story o f the b o o k A w a l k through the contents

Witten and Frank's textbook was one of two
books that 1 used for a data mining class in
the Fall o f 2001. T h e b o o k covers all m a j o r
methods o f data mining that p r o d u c e a
knowledge representation as output.
Knowledge representation is hereby
u n d e r s t o o d as a representation that can be
studied, understood, and interpreted by
h u m a n beings, at least in principle. T h u s ,
neural networks and genetic algorithms are
excluded f r o m the topics of this textbook.
W e need to say "can be u n d e r s t o o d in
principle" b e c a u s e a large decision tree or a
large rule set m a y be as hard to interpret as a
neural network.
T h e b o o k first develops the basic m a c h i n e
learning and data mining methods. T h e s e
include decision trees, classification and
association rules, s u p p o r t vector machines,
instance-based learning, Naive
classifiers, clustering, and numeric
prediction based on linear regression,
regression trees, and model trees. It then
goes deeper into evaluation
i m p l e m e n t a t i o n issues. Next it moves on to
deeper c o v e r a g e of issues such as attribute
selection, discretization, data cleansing, and
c o m b i n a t i o n s o f multiple models (bagging,
boosting, and stacking). T h e final c h a p t e r
deals with a d v a n c e d topics such as visual
m a c h i n e learning, text mining, and W e b
mining.
T h e greatest strength of this Data M i n i n g
b o o k lies outside o f the b o o k itself. All the
algorithms described in this b o o k are
i m p l e m e n t e d and freely available t h r o u g h
the WEK.A ( W a i k a t o E n v i r o n m e n t for
Knowledge Ana lys is) W e b s i te
(www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka). Chapter 8
o f the book is a tutorial to the i m p l e m e n t e d
algorithms. T h e integration b e t w e e n the
b o o k and the W e b site is excellent, and the
W e b site is alive, thriving and growing.
T h u s , the n u m b e r o f data mining a l g o r i t h m s
available on the W e b site goes far beyond
what is described in the book. Indeed. even
Neural N e t w o r k s have been added to the
W e b site since the b o o k was first published.
W h i l e m a n y books offer an associated W e b
site by now, the close linkage between b o o k
and W e b site and the rapid g r o w t h o f the
W e b site are highly c o m m e n d a b l e .
Bayes
A n o t h e r pleasant feature o f the W E K A
i m p l e m e n t a t i o n is that it is d o n e in Java.
T h i s m a k e s it possible to c o n s t r u c t systems,
and based on Java, that capitalize on the other
strengths of Java, s u c h as access to relational
d a t a b a s e s t h r o u g h J D B C and easy access to
W e b pages f r o m within Java p r o g r a m s .
T a r g e t audience
T h e b o o k is written for a c a d e m i c s and
practitioners and I believe it can be well
understood, even by undergraduate students.

76 SIGMOD R e c o r d , Vol. 31, N o . 1, M a r c h 2002

 In fact, it is probably the most accessible
survey of data mining in print, without
sacrificing too much of precision and rigor.
The book is written in a highly redundant
style, which I would like to describe as an
exercise in iterative deepening. Basic
concepts are repeated in several chapters.
but covered to a deeper level in the later
chapters. This should make it easy for
students to keep reading it, without having
to refer back to earlier chapters at every step
of the way. On the other hand. for a person
that is already familiar with the basics of
data mining, this makes boring reading at
some places. However, I do not recommend
a streamlining of the book. Instead, I
recommend that readers with some
knowledge of the topic may skip paragraphs
that sound familiar without any guilty
feelings.
have) to strengthen the formulas, without
necessarily adding new ones.
At a few places, the book could also be
improved by adding rnore explanations to
figures. Figure 3.6 is a prime example for
this issue. I found myself spending time
verifying that instance counts in two
subfigurcs truly add to the same total (of
209). They do. The reader could be spared
this effort by a better caption or a better
description in the body of the text.
Similarly, the Apriori algorithm is
introduced in a figure, but only in the
"'Further Reading" subsection (following
much later) is the name of the algorithm
mentioned. A better figure caption would
help the scholarly advancement of students
who might not take the "Further Reading"
section that seriously.

Reviewer's appreciation In America we say "Actions speak louder

than words". Thus. instead of summarizing
The book goes to great lengths to avoid the book I will describe some actions that I
"formula shock". Formulas are developed intend to take (or that I am already taking).
step-by-step and well explained. Only (1) I am using W E K A for my research.
absolutely necessary formulas are included. (2) If I teach the same course again, I will
In many cases, where the derivation of a use Witten and Frank's book again.
complex result is irrelevant to the actual data (3) If the book appears in a second edition, I
mining issues, the authors defer to statistics will acquire it.
textbooks. While I am greatly in favor of
both these approaches in writing textbooks, I
feel that they have gone too far at a few
places. At a number of places, the authors
avoid introducing "'one more letter" to keep
the text readable. However, the price they
pay for that is that many of their formulas
have no cclual signs. Thus, a sentence is
terminated with a colon and followed with a
formula, which is presumably equal to the
quantity described by the sentence. This is
done on many pages, e.g., 132--135, 137,
196, 207, 222, etc. Not in my wildest
dreams would I have thought that I could
ever criticize a book author for having too
few formulas and too few variables. But
this is exactly what I need to do here. While
I do not recommend eliminating the
previously mentioned redundancy of
description, I do recommend for the next
edition (which this book will undoubtedly

SIGMOD Record, Vol. 31, No. 1, March 2002 77

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