Andrew Chisholm completed his degree in Physics from Oxford University nearly thirty years ago. This coincided with the growth in software engineering and it led him to a career in the IT industry. For the last decade he has been very involved in mobile telecommunications, where he is currently a product manager for a market-leading test and monitoring solution used by many mobile operators worldwide.

Throughout his career, he has always maintained an active interest in all aspects of data. In particular, he has always enjoyed finding ways to extract value from data and presenting this in compelling ways to help others meet their objectives. Recently, he completed a Master's in Data Mining and Business Intelligence with first class honors. He is a certified RapidMiner expert and has been using this product to solve real problems for several years. He maintains a blog where he shares some miscellaneous helpful advice on how to get the best out of RapidMiner.

He approaches problems from a practical perspective and has a great deal of relevant hands-on experience with real data. This book draws this experience together in the context of exploring data—the first and most important step in a data mining process.

He has published conference papers relating to unsupervised clustering and cluster validity measures and contributed a chapter called Visualizing cluster validity measures to an upcoming book entitled RapidMiner: Use Cases and Business Analytics Applications, Chapman & Hall/CRC