To the Instructor

This book is designed to give a broad, yet detailed overview of the data mining field. It can be used to teach an introductory course on data mining at an advanced undergraduate level or at the first-year graduate level. Sample course syllabi are provided on the book’s web sites www.cs.uiuc.edu/~hanj/bk3 and www.booksite.mkp.com/datamining3e in addition to extensive teaching resources such as lecture slides, instructors’ manuals, and reading lists (see p. xxix).

Depending on the length of the instruction period, the background of students, and your interests, you may select subsets of chapters to teach in various sequential orderings. For example, if you would like to give only a short introduction to students on data mining, you may follow the suggested sequence in Figure P.1. Notice that depending on the need, you can also omit some sections or subsections in a chapter if desired.

Depending on the length of the course and its technical scope, %time available and technical emphasis, you may choose to selectively add more chapters to this preliminary sequence. For example, instructors who are more interested in advanced classification methods may first add “Chapter 9. Classification: Advanced Methods”; those more interested in pattern mining may choose to include “Chapter 7. Advanced Pattern Mining”; whereas those interested in OLAP and data cube technology may like to add “Chapter 4. Data Warehousing and Online Analytical Processing” and “Chapter 5. Data Cube Technology.”

Alternatively, you may choose to teach the whole book in a two-course sequence that covers all of the chapters in the book, plus, when time permits, some advanced topics such as graph and network mining. Material for such advanced topics may be selected from the companion chapters available from the book’s web site, accompanied with a set of selected research papers.

Individual chapters in this book can also be used for tutorials or for special topics in related courses, such as machine learning, pattern recognition, data warehousing, and intelligent data analysis.

Each chapter ends with a set of exercises, suitable as assigned homework. The exercises are either short questions that test basic mastery of the material covered, longer questions that require analytical thinking, or implementation projects. Some exercises can also be used as research discussion topics. The bibliographic notes at the end of each chapter can be used to find the research literature that contains the origin of the concepts and methods presented, in-depth treatment of related topics, and possible extensions.