Data Mining

Booknews

Jack Woehr

Dowsing for Data

Reading Data Mining by Bhavani Thuraisingham is a poignant experience. Thuraisingham is aware that the technology she expounds has within it the potential to take away human freedom. Successfully raising the issue, she fails to address it satisfactorily in an otherwise masterful and readable summary of her field.

Data Mining is a scholarly work. The author commences from an epistemological standpoint:

"The actual universe has the truth about all of the entitites in the universe. The perceived universe is the people's view of the universe. This view is usually determined by someone or a group of people in authority."

Indeed. If the credit bureau demurs, you'll be rented no apartment.

"For data modeling purposes, it is the perceived view of the universe that is of interest. This is because the views of the users of the database must be correctly reflected."

Clearly the credit bureau's perceived universe is more valid than your's or mine, because they have paid for the data mining.

"For example, an intelligence agency could determine abnormal behavior of its employees using this technology."

There are fair indications that they already track the behavior of citizens using the Internet. Is being spied on by a chron process more scientific than being tested for witchcraft by being tossed bound into a river to see if you float?

Is it Safeway or Visa who knows best what to do with the record of every prescription you ever purchased, or is it the DEA? How many hits have you made, intentionally or inadvertently, on Web sites containing pornography? Sites that mention legalizing marijuana? Which offer abortion information? Addresses of gay support groups? Guns for sale?

These concerns represent what the author calls the "social and political" aspects that one should "note," in closing Chapter 13 on "Security and Privacy." That chapter, by the way, is mostly about maintaining the security and privacy of the data itself, not the security and privacy of the lives it shadows. "We need the technology first before we can enforce various policies and procedures," Thuraisingham concludes laconically.

Who is mining what inferences from what data? Data Mining shrugs and turns to the more entertaining topic of deceiving "the adversary" and making him doubt his data mining tool and its inferences.

Data Mining is a profound overview of an important domain of human knowledge, as well as a profound reminder, as if one more were needed at the close of the twentieth century, that science is by itself amoral and available to the highest bidder.

Data Mining is not an implementation book; we remain in the domain of theory with a bibliography of practical works. If you are looking for the broad contours of the field depicted by a distinguished expert, Bhavani Thuraisingham, 1997 winner of IEEE's Technical Achievement Award, has produced a memorable opus.
— Dr. Dobb's Electronic Review of Computer Books