A quick and dirty description of data mining I hear in the field can be paraphrased as: "Descriptive and predictive analytics with a focus on previously hidden relationships or trends". As such, this book will cover these topics and skip the predictive analytics that focus on automation of obvious prediction, along with the entire field of prescriptive analytics entirely. This text is meant to be a quick start guide, so even the relevant fields of study will only be skimmed over and summarized. Please see the Recommended reading for further explanation section for inquiring minds that want to delve deeper into some of the subjects covered in this book.
Preprocessing and data transformation are typically considered to be outside of the data mining category. One of the goals of this book is to provide full working data mining examples, and basic preprocessing is required to do this right. So, this book will cover those topics, before delving in to the more traditional mining strategies.