Introduction

Association rule mining is an important topic in data mining. Our work in this book focuses on this topic. To briefly clarify the background of association rule mining in this chapter, we will concentrate on introducing data mining techniques.In Section 1.1 we begin with explaining what data mining is. In Section 1.2 we argue as to why data mining is needed. In Section 1.3 we recall the process of knowledge discovery in databases (KDD). In Section 1.4 we demonstrate data mining tasks and faced data types. Section 1.5 introduces some basic data mining techniques. Section 1.6 presents data mining and marketing. In Section 1.7, we show some examples where data mining is applied to real-world problems. And, finally in Section 1.8 we discuss future work involving data mining.