Introduction

Recent advances in data collection and storage technologies have made it possible for companies (e.g., bar-code technology), administrative agencies (e.g., census data), and scientific laboratories (e.g., molecule databases in chemistry or biology) to keep vast amounts of data relating to their activities. At the same time, the availability of cheap computing power has made automatic extraction of structured knowledge from these data feasible. Such an activity is referred to as data mining. More recently, the advent in the marketplace of cheap high performance (gigabit level) communication switches is even placing cheap parallel data mining within the reach of the majority. Data mining includes such activities as classification, clustering, similarity analysis, summarization, association rule and sequential pattern discovery, and so forth. The book focuses on the development of sequential and parallel algorithms for association rule and sequential pattern discovery.