The potential business advantages of data mining are well documented in publications for executives and managers. However, developers implementing major data-mining systems need concrete information about the underlying technical principles - and their practical manifestations - in order to either integrate commercially available tools or write data-mining programs from scratch. This book is the first technical guide to provide a complete, generalized roadmap for developing data-mining applications, together with advice on performing these large-scale, open-ended analyses for real-world data warehouses. This work: focuses on the preparation and organization of data and the development of an overall strategy for data mining; reviews sophisticated prediction methods that search for patterns in big data; describes how to accurately estimate future performance of proposed solutions; and, illustrates the data-mining process and its potential pitfalls through real-life case studies.