Data Mining

Data Mining

^Ø Broadly speaking, data mining is the process of semi-automatically analyzing large databases to find useful patterns.

^Ø Like knowledge discovery in artificial intelligence data mining discovers statistical rules and patterns

^Ø Differs from machine learning in that it deals with large volumes of data stored primarily on disk.

^Ø Some types of knowledge discovered from a database can be represented by a set of rules. e.g.,: ―Young women with annual incomes greater than $50,000 are most likely to buy sports cars‖.

^Ø Other types of knowledge represented by equations, or by prediction functions.

^Ø Some manual intervention is usually required

· Pre-processing of data, choice of which type of pattern to find, postprocessing to find novel patterns

Applications of Data Mining

^Ø Prediction based on past history

· Predict if a credit card applicant poses a good credit risk, based on some attributes (income, job type, age, ..) and past history

· Predict if a customer is likely to switch brand loyalty

· Predict if a customer is likely to respond to ―junk mail‖

· Predict if a pattern of phone calling card usage is likely to be fraudulent ^Ø Some examples of prediction mechanisms: