The series, Contemporary Perspectives on Data Mining, is composed of blindrefereed scholarly research methods and applications of data mining. This serieswill be targeted both at the academic community, as well as the businesspractitioner.Data mining seeks to discover knowledge from vast amounts of data with the use of statistical and mathematicaltechniques. The knowledge is extracted form this data by examining the patterns of the data, whether they beassociations of groups or things, predictions, sequential relationships between time order events or naturalgroups.Data mining applications are seen in finance (banking, brokerage, insurance), marketing (customer relationships,retailing, logistics, travel), as well as in manufacturing, health care, fraud detection, home-land security, and lawenforcement.