Textbooks for data mining

November 16, 2008

I finally  made a decision regarding what textbook to use for a data mining course I will be teaching in the spring. One challenge was that the course is cross-listed in a variety of departments: computer science, business, and information technology and, as a result, the students taking the class will have a diversity of backgrounds–some strong in statistics, others in programming. My original plan was not to have people do programming at all and have them just use Weka, a free, data mining tool. I was considering 2 textbooks: Introduction to Data Mining by Pang-Ning Tan, Michael Steinbach, and Vipin Kumar; and Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques, by Ian Witten and Eibe Frank. >>