
CHAPTER 2
Mathematical Foundations
Data mining is a data analysis process involving in data itself, operators
and various numeric metrics. Before we go deeply into the algorithm and
technique part, we fi rst summarize and present some relevant basic but
important expressions and concepts from mathematical books and open
available sources (e.g., Wikipedia).
2.1 Organization of Data
As mentioned earlier, data sets come in different forms [1]: these forms are
known as schemas. The simplest form of data is a set of vector measurements
on objects o(1), · · · , o(n). For each object we have measurements of p variables
X
1
, · · · ,X
p
. Thus, the data can ...