The goal of this book is to provide, in a friendly and refreshing manner, both theoretical concepts and practical techniques for the important and exciting field of Artificial Intelligence that can be directly applied to real-world healthcare problems. Healthcare - the final frontier. Lately, it seems like Pandora opened the box and evil was released into the world. Fortunately, there was one thing left in the box: hope. In recent decades, hope has been increasingly represented by Intelligent Decision Support Systems. Their continuing mission: to explore strange new diseases, to seek out new treatments and drugs, and to intelligently manage healthcare resources and patients. Hence, this book is designed for all those who wish to learn how to explore, analyze and find new solutions for the most challenging domain of all time: healthcare.

The knowledge discovery process is as old as Homo sapiens. Until some time ago this process was solely based on the 'natural personal' computer provided by Mother Nature. Fortunately, in recent decades the problem has begun to be solved based on the development of the Data mining technology, aided by the huge computational power of the 'artificial' computers. Digging intelligently in different large databases, data mining aims to extract implicit, previously unknown and potentially useful information from data, since "knowledge is power." The goal of this book is to provide, in a friendly way, both theoretical concepts and, especially, practical techniques of this exciting field, ready to be applied in real-world situations. Accordingly, it is meant for all those who wish to learn how to explore and analysis of large quantities of data in order to discover the hidden nugget of information.

The knowledge discovery process is as old as Homo sapiens. Until some time ago this process was solely based on the 'natural personal' computer provided by Mother Nature. Fortunately, in recent decades the problem has begun to be solved based on the development of the Data mining technology, aided by the huge computational power of the 'artificial' computers. Digging intelligently in different large databases, data mining aims to extract implicit, previously unknown and potentially useful information from data, since "knowledge is power." The goal of this book is to provide, in a friendly way, both theoretical concepts and, especially, practical techniques of this exciting field, ready to be applied in real-world situations. Accordingly, it is meant for all those who wish to learn how to explore and analysis of large quantities of data in order to discover the hidden nugget of information.