Editor's note: This is an excerpt from Ron Zacharski's freely available online book titled A Programmer's Guide to Data Mining: The Ancient Art of the Numerati. At the end of the previous chapter we worked with three different datasets: the women athlete dataset, the iris dataset, and the auto miles-per-gallon one. We divided each of these datasets in turn into two subsets. One subset we used to construct the classifier. This data set is called the training set.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.It is available as a free download under a Creative Commons license. You are free to share the book, translate it, or remix it. Before you is a tool for learning basic data mining techniques. Most data mining textbooks focus on providing a theoretical foundation for data mining, and as result, may seem notoriously difficult to understand. Don't get me wrong, the information in those books is extremely important.