Information AboutData Mining |
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Data Mining, also known as '''Knowledge-Discovery in Databases (KDD)''', is the process of automatically searching large volumes of Data for patterns. Data Mining is a fairly recent and contemporary topic in computing. However, Data Mining applies many older computational techniques from Statistics , Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition . DEFINITION Data Mining can be defined as "The nontrivial extraction of implicit, previously unknown, and potentially useful information from data" and "The science of extracting useful information from large data sets or databases" . Although it is usually used in relation to analysis of data, data mining, like Artificial Intelligence , is an umbrella term and is used with varied meaning in a wide range of contexts. It is usually associated with a business or other organization's need to identify trends. A simple example of data mining is its use in a retail sales department. If a store tracks the purchases of a customer and notices that a customer buys a lot of silk shirts, the data mining system will make a correlation between that customer and silk shirts. The sales department will look at that information and may begin direct mail marketing of silk shirts to that customer, or it may alternatively attempt to get the customer to buy a wider range of products. In this case, the data mining system used by the retail store discovered new information about the customer that was previously unknown to the company. Another widely used (though hypothetical) example is that of a very large North American chain of supermarkets. Through intensive analysis of the transactions and the goods bought over a period of time, analysts found that beers and diapers were often bought together. Though explaining this interrelation might be difficult, taking advantage of it, on the other hand, should not be hard (e.g. placing the high-profit diapers next to the high-profit beers). This technique is often referred to as ''Market Basket Analysis''. In statistical analyses, in which there is no underlying theoretical model, data mining is often approximated via stepwise Regression methods wherein the space of 2k possible relationships between a single outcome variable and k potential explanatory variables is ''smartly'' searched. With the advent of Parallel Computing , it became possible (when k is less than approximately 40) to examine all 2k models. This procedure is called ''all subsets'' or ''exhaustive'' regression. Some of the first applications of exhaustive regression involved the study of plant data. DATA DREDGING Used in the technical context of Data Warehousing and analysis, the term "data mining" is neutral. However, it sometimes has a more pejorative usage that implies imposing patterns (and particularly causal relationships) on data where none exist. This imposition of irrelevant, misleading or trivial attribute correlation is more properly criticized as " Data Dredging " in the statistical literature. Another term for this misuse of statistics is data fishing. Used in this latter sense, data dredging implies scanning the data for any relationships, and then when one is found coming up with an interesting explanation. (This is also referred to as "overfitting the model".) The problem is that large data sets invariably happen to have some exciting relationships peculiar to that data. Therefore any conclusions reached are likely to be highly suspect. In spite of this, some Exploratory Data Work is always required in any applied statistical analysis to get a feel for the data, so sometimes the line between good statistical practice and data dredging is less than clear. One common approach to evaluating the fitness of a model generated via data mining techniques is called '' Cross Validation ''. Cross validation is a technique that produces an estimate of generalization error based on resampling. In simple terms, the general idea behind cross validation is that dividing the data into two or or more separate data subsets allows one subset to be used to evaluate the generalizeability of the model learned from the other data subset(s). A data subset used to build a model is called a ''training set''; the evaluation data subset is called the ''test set''. Common cross validation techniques include the '' Holdout Method '', '' K-fold Cross Validation '', and the '' Leave-one-out Method ''. Another pitfall of using data mining is that it may lead to discovering correlations that may not exist. "There have always been a considerable number of people who busy themselves examining the last thousand numbers which have appeared on a Roulette wheel, in search of some repeating pattern. Sadly enough, they have usually found it." . However, when properly done, determining correlations in investment analysis has proven to be very profitable for Statistical Arbitrage operations (such as Pairs Trading strategies), and furthermore correlation analysis has shown to be very useful in Risk Management . Indeed, finding correlations in the financial markets, when done properly, is not the same as finding false patterns in roulette wheels. Most data mining efforts are focused on developing a finely-grained, highly detailed model of some large data set. Other researchers have described an alternate method that involves finding the minimal differences between elements in a data set, with the goal of developing simpler models that represent relevant data. PRIVACY CONCERNS There are also Privacy concerns associated with data mining - specifically regarding the source of the data analyzed. For example, if an employer has access to medical records, they may screen out people who have diabetes or have had a heart attack. Screening out such employees will cut costs for insurance, but it creates ethical and legal problems. Data mining government or commercial data sets for national security or law enforcement purposes has also raised privacy concerns. There are many legitimate uses of data mining. For example, a database of prescription drugs taken by a group of people could be used to find combinations of drugs exhibiting harmful interactions. Since any particular combination may occur in only 1 out of 1000 people, a great deal of data would need to be examined to discover such an interaction. A project involving pharmacies could reduce the number of drug reactions and potentially save lives. Unfortunately, there is also a huge potential for abuse of such a database. Essentially, data mining gives information that would not be available otherwise. It must be properly interpreted to be useful. When the data collected involves individual people, there are many questions concerning privacy, legality, and ethics. COMBINATORIAL GAME DATA MINING
Since the early 1990s, with the availability of oracles for certain combinatorial games, also called in dots-and-boxes etc. and John Nunn in Chess Endgame s are notable examples of people doing this work, though they were not and are not involved in tablebase generation. NOTABLE USES OF DATA MINING
SEE ALSO
Software
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