Chapter 1, Setting the Scene, describes the main challenges when mining real data. These challenges arise because data is big and, in the real world, it is unstructured, difficult to visualize, and time consuming to bring order to.

Chapter 2, Loading Data, describes the different ways of loading data into RapidMiner Studio and the advanced techniques sometimes needed to transform raw unstructured data into a common format.

Chapter 3, Visualizing Data, describes the visualization techniques available in RapidMiner Studio to help make sense of data.

Chapter 4, Parsing and Converting Attributes, explains that data is rarely in precisely the right format and, therefore, needs to be parsed to extract specific information or converted into a different representation.

Chapter 5, Outliers, explains that real data contains values that do not seem to fit the rest of the data. There are many reasons for this and it is important to have a strategy for identifying and dealing with them, otherwise model accuracy risks can be severely compromised.

Chapter 6, Missing Values, explains that real data inevitably contains missing values. Simple deletion of rows containing missing values can quickly lead to a significant reduction in the performance of a data mining algorithm. Much better techniques exist.

Chapter 7, Transforming Data, covers techniques to restructure the data into new representations that can assist its exploration and understanding.

Chapter 8, Reducing Data Size, explains that reducing the number of rows will generally speed up processing but will reduce accuracy. Balancing this is important for large datasets. Reducing the number of columns of data can often improve model accuracy and for large datasets it is doubly valuable as it can speed up processing in general.

Chapter 9, Resource Constraints, explains that processing large amounts of data requires a lot of physical processing power and memory, to say nothing of the amount of time. This chapter gives some techniques to help measure process performance. Sometimes, it is not possible to process the data using available resources and in this situation, some techniques can be adopted to persuade the process to complete.

Chapter 10, Debugging, explains that when something goes wrong, it can be frustrating and time consuming to detect and resolve the problem. This chapter gives some generic methods for making this process a bit easier.

Chapter 11, Taking Stock, explains that having reached this point, the reader will have a greater visibility of the possibilities to process, clean, and explore data as part of the data mining process. This will be a stepping stone to more complex data mining techniques.

You will need some basic previous exposure to RapidMiner.The latest version of RapidMiner is now RapidMiner Studio which adds some templating features to help analysts get going more quickly as well as some changes to the look and feel of the GUI in general. This book uses the latest version and it is assumed that you have installed it so that you can download and try the example processes that are worked through in the text.

This book is for data analysts with some experience of RapidMiner who wish to use it to explore real data as part of an overall data mining or business intelligence objective. It is very likely that the analyst may have spent some initial time on mining data but could not get the results they wanted. This book gives some real examples and helps to build a context in which data exploration can be done.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "To identify missing attributes, the Filter Examples operator can be used."

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "The featureNames attribute shows the attributes that were used to create the various performance measurements."

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