The paper reviews applications of data mining in manufacturing engineering, in particular production processes, operations, fault detection, maintenance, decision support, and product quality improvement. Customer relationship management, information integration aspects, and standardization are also briefly discussed. This review is focused on demonstrating the relevancy of data mining to manufacturing industry, rather than discussing the data mining domain in general. The volume of general data mining literature makes it difficult to gain a precise view of a target area such as manufacturing engineering, which has its own particular needs and requirements for mining applications. This review reveals progressive applications in addition to existing gaps and less considered areas such as manufacturing planning and shop floor control.

Summary A case-control study on cancers of the oral cavity was conducted by utilising data from the population based cancer registry, Bangalore, India. Three hundred and forty-eight cases of cancers of the oral cavity (excluding base tongue) were age and sex matched with controls from the same residential area but with no evidence of cancer. The relative risk due to pan tobacco chewing was elevated in both males and females, being appreciably higher in the latter ( There have been five previous case-control studies on oral cancer from this part of the world (Orr, 1933; Shanta & Krishnamoorthy, 1959, 1963Hirayama, 1966;Sankarnarayanan et al., 1989)

In Bangalore, cancer of the oesophagus is the third most common cancer in males and fourth most common in females with average annual age-adjusted incidence rates of 8.2 and 8.9 per 100,000 respectively. A case-control investigation of cancer of the oesophagus was conducted based on the Population-based cancer registry, Bangalore, India. Three hundred and forty-three cases of cancer of the oesophagus were age and sex matched with twice the number of controls from the same area, but with no evidence of cancer. Chewing with or without tobacco was a significant risk factor. In both sexes chewing was not a risk factor for cancer of the upper third of the oesophagus. Among males, non-tobacco chewing was a significant risk factor for the middle third but not for the other two segments and tobacco chewing was a significant risk factor for the lower third of the oesophagus, but not for the other two segments. Bidi smoking in males was a significant risk factor for all three segments being highest for the upper third, less for the middle third and still less for the lower third. The risk of oesophageal cancer associated with alcohol drinking was significant only for the middle third.

• This is an article from the journal, Proceedings of the IMechE, Abstract: Modern manufacturing systems equipped with computerized data logging systems collect large volumes of data in real time. The data may contain valuable information for operation and control strategies as well as providing knowledge of normal and abnormal operational patterns. Knowledge discovery in databases can be applied to these data to unearth hidden, unknown, representable, and ultimately useful knowledge. Data mining offers tools for discovery of patterns, associations, changes, anomalies, rules, and statistically significant structures and events in data. Extraction of previously unknown, meaningful information from manufacturing databases provides knowledge that may benefit many application areas within the enterprise, for example improving design or fine tuning production processes. This paper examines the application of association rules to manufacturing databases to extract useful information about a manufacturing system's capabilities and its constraints. The quality of each identified rule is tested and, from numerous rules, only those that are statistically very strong and contain substantial design information are selected. The final set of extracted rules contains very interesting information relating to the geometry of the product and also indicates where limitations exist for improvement of the manufacturing processes involved in the production of complex geometric shapes.

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