Data Mining and Decision Support

Data mining deals with finding patterns in data that are by user-definition, interesting and valid. It is an interdisciplinary area involving databases, machine learning, pattern recognition, statistics, visualization and others.
Decision support focuses on developing systems to help decision-makers solve problems. Decision support provides a selection of data analysis, simulation, visualization and modeling techniques, and software tools such as decision support systems, group decision support and mediation systems, expert systems, databases and data warehouses.

Independently, data mining and decision support are well-developed research areas, but until now there has been no systematic attempt to integrate them. Data Mining and Decision Support: Integration and Collaboration, written by leading researchers in the field, presents a conceptual framework, plus the methods and tools for integrating the two disciplines and for applying this technology to business problems in a collaborative setting.

From the reviews:

"This multi-authored book reports the findings of a European Commission sponsored project ... . The aim of the project was to bring together the two disciplines, or practices, of data mining and decision support ... . This book ... can be recommended highly, to researchers or practitioners in the information sciences wanting an insight into just what data mining and decision support are really about, and where their potential lies." (David Bawden, JDOC - Journal of Documentation, Vol. 61 (3), 2005)