Data mining tools and application in power system engineering

The power system field is presently facing an explosive growth of data. The data mining (DM) approach provides tools for making explicit some implicit subtle structure in data. Applying data mining to power system engineering is an iterative and interactive process, requiring an acquainted user with the application specifics. The paper describes data mining tools like statistical methos, visualization, machine learning and neural networks, exemplifying by results obtained with a DM software developed for dynamic security assessment studies. Power system engineering applications where data mining would be useful are reviewed in the second part of the paper.