Environmental Applications of Data Mining

Data mining, the central activity in the process of knowledge discovery in databases (KDD), is concerned with finding patterns in data. This paper introduces and illustrates the most common types of patterns considered by data mining approaches and gives rough outlines of the data mining algorithms that are most frequently used to look for such patterns. In this paper, we also to give an overview of KDD applications in environmental sciences, complemented with a sample of case studies. The latter are described in slightly more detail and used to illustrate KDD-related issues that arise in environmental applications. The application domains addressed mostly concern ecological modelling.