Much of the material in this chapter is extracted from my prior book, Assessing and Improving Prediction and Classification. My apologies to those readers who may feel cheated by this. However, this material is critical to the current text, and I felt that it would be unfair to force readers to buy my prior book in order to procure required background.
The essence of data mining is the discovery of relationships among variables that we have measured. Throughout this book we will explore many ways to find, present, and capitalize on such relationships. In this chapter, ...