Data Mining Functionalities - What Kinds of Patterns Can Be Mined?

Data Mining Functionalities—What Kinds of Patterns Can Be Mined?

Data mining functionalities are used to specify the kind of patterns to be found in data mining tasks. data mining tasks can be classified into two categories: descriptive and predictive.

Descriptive mining tasks characterize the general properties of the data in the database. Predictive mining tasks perform inference on the current data in order to make predictions.

Concept/Class Description: Characterization and Discrimination

Data can be associated with classes or concepts. For example, in the AllElectronics store, classes of items for sale include computers and printers, and concepts of customers include bigSpenders and budgetSpenders. It can be useful to describe individual classes and concepts in summarized, concise, and yet precise terms. Such descriptions of a class or a concept are called class/concept descriptions. These descriptions can be derived via

data characterization, by summarizing the data of the class under study (often called the target class) in general terms,

data discrimination, by comparison of the target class with one or a set of comparative classes (often called the contrasting classes), or (3) both data characterization and discrimination.

Data characterization is a summarization of the general characteristics or features of a target class of data. The data corresponding to the user-specified class are typically collected by a database query the output of data characterization can be presented in various forms. Examples include pie charts, bar charts, curves, multidimensional data cubes, and multidimensional tables, including crosstabs.

Data discrimination is a comparison of the general features of target class data objects with the general features of objects from one or a set of contrasting classes. The target and contrasting classes can be specified by the user, and the corresponding data objects retrieved through database queries.

“How are discrimination descriptions output?”

Discrimination descriptions expressed in rule form are referred to as discriminate rules.

Mining Frequent Patterns, Associations, and Correlations

Frequent patterns, as the name suggests, are patterns that occur frequently in data. There are many kinds of frequent patterns, including itemsets, subsequences, and substructures.

A frequent itemset typically refers to a set of items that frequently appear together in a transactional data set, such as Computer and Software. A frequently occurring subsequence, such as thepattern that customers tend to purchase first a PC, followed by a digital camera, and then a memory card, is a (frequent) sequential pattern.

Example: Association analysis. Suppose, as a marketing manager of AllElectronics, you would like to determine which items are frequently purchased together within the same transactions. An example of such a rule, mined from the AllElectronics transactional database, is buys(X;

―computer‖) buys(X; ―software‖) [support = 1%, confidence = 50%]

where X is a variable representing a customer. A confidence, or certainty, of 50% means that if a customer buys a computer, there is a 50% chance that she will buy software as well. A 1% support means that 1% of all of the transactions under analysis showed that computer and software were purchased together. This association rule involves a single attribute or predicate (i.e., buys) that repeats. Association rules that contain a single predicate are referred to as single-dimensional association rules. Dropping the predicate notation, the above rule can be written simply as ―compute software [1%, 50%]‖.

Classification and Prediction

Classification is the process of finding a model (or function) that describes and distinguishes data classes or concepts, for the purpose of being able to use the model to predict the class of objects whose class label is unknown. The derived model is based on the analysis of a set of training data (i.e., data objects whose class label is known).

“How is the derived model presented?” The derived model may be represented in various forms, such as classification (IF-THEN) rules, decision trees, mathematical formulae, or neural networks

A decision tree is a flow-chart-like tree structure, where each node denotes a test on an attribute value, each branch represents an outcome of the test, and tree leaves represent classes or class distributions. Decision trees can easily be converted to classification rules

A neural network, when used for classification, is typically a collection of neuron-like processing units with weighted connections between the units. There are many other methods for constructing classification models, such as naïve

Bayesian classification, support vector machines, and k-nearest neighbor classification. Whereas classification predicts categorical (discrete, unordered) labels, prediction models Continuous-valued functions. That is, it is used to predict missing or unavailable numerical data values rather than class labels. Although the term prediction may refer to both numeric prediction and class label prediction,

Cluster Analysis

Classification and prediction analyze class-labeled data objects, where as clustering analyzes data objects without consulting a known class label.

Outlier Analysis

A database may contain data objects that do not comply with the general behavior or model of the data. These data objects are outliers. Most data mining methods discard outliers as noise or exceptions. However, in some applications such as fraud detection, the rare events can be more interesting than the more regularly occurring ones. The analysis of outlier data is referred to as outlier mining.

Evolution Analysis

Data evolution analysis describes and models regularities or trends for objects whose behavior changes over time. Although this may include characterization, discrimination, association and correlation analysis, classification, prediction, or clustering of time related data, distinct features of such an analysis include time-series data analysis,Sequence or periodicity pattern matching, and similarity-based data analysis.