Data Mining in Aviation Safety Data Analysis

This chapter introduces aviation safety data analysis as an important application area for data mining. In the beginning of the chapter, the reader is introduced to the basic concepts of data mining. After that, the field of aviation safety management is discussed, and in that connection data mining is identified as a key technology to study through flight incidents reports. Afterwards the test runs for four data mining products, for possible use in the Finnish civil aviation authority, are described in detail. However, before the testing of tools the preparation of the test data for the tools is described in detail. The chapter ends with conclusions that tell that even sophisticated data mining tools are just tools: they do not provide any automatic tools, but skilled users can use them for searching clues in the data.