A lot of the concepts in data mining / machine learning seem to share commonalities that suggest a unification is possible. For example, SVD is related to PCA is related to K-means clustering is related to the Lloyd Algorithm is related to Vector Quantization is related to compression is related to MDL is related to Kolmogorov complexity. K-means is also related to kNN classification is related to boosting is related to SVMs is related to regression is related to neural networks.

And so on. All of these concepts share notions. The question is whether they can be treated as the overall expression of one concept.

The answer is probably no, but they certainly could be condensed as new results arise.