Data Mining

Sangeeta Devadiga CS 157B, Spring 2007

Agenda
What is Data Mining? Data Mining Tasks Challenges in Data mining

What is Data Mining

Data mining is integral part of knowledge discovery in databases (KDD), which is the overall process of converting raw data into useful information. This process consists of series of transformation steps from preprocessing to postprocessing of data mining results

Process of Knowledge Discovery in Database(KDD)

Normalization. Data subsetting Filtering Patterns,Visualization, Pattern Interpretation

Input Data

Data Preprocessing

Data Mining

PostProcessing

Information

Input data

Data Mining Tasks

Data Mining is generally divided into two tasks. 1. Predictive tasks 2. Descriptive tasks

Predictive Tasks
Objective: Predict the value of a specific attribute (target/dependent variable)based on the value of other attributes (explanatory). Example: Judge if a patient has specific disease based on his/her medical tests results.

Descriptive Tasks
Objective: To derive patterns (correlation,trends,trajectories) that summarizes the underlying relationship between data. Example: Identifying web pages that are accessed together.(human interpretable pattern)

Data Mining Tasks [contd.]

Classification [Predictive] Clustering [Descriptive] Association Rule Discovery[Descriptive] Sequential Pattern Discovery [Descriptive] Regression [Predictive] Deviation Detection [Predictive]

Classification: Definition
Classification: Given a collection of records Each record contains a set of attributes, one of the attribute is a class. Find a model for class attribute as a function of values of other attributes.

Goal: previously unseen records should be assigned a class as accurately as possible.

A test set is used to determine the accuracy of the model. Usually, the given data set is divided into training and test sets, with training set used to build the model and test set used to validate it.

Classification: Example
Direct Marketing Goal: Reduce cost of mailing by targeting a set of consumers likely to buy a new product.

Approach:

Use the data for a similar product introduced before. We know which customers decided to buy and which decided otherwise. This {buy, dont buy} decision forms the class attribute. Collect various demographic, lifestyle, and company-interaction related information about all such customers.
Type of business, where they stay, how much they earn, etc.

Use this information as input attributes to learn a classifier model. (from Berry & Linoff, 1997)

Clustering: Definition
Given a set of data points, each having a set of attributes, and a similarity measure among them, find clusters such that

Data points in one cluster are more similar to one another. Data points in separate clusters are less similar to one another.

Clustering: Example
Document Clustering:

Goal: To find groups of documents that are similar to each other based on the important terms appearing in them. Approach: To identify frequently occurring terms in each document. Form a similarity measure based on the frequencies of different terms. Use it to cluster. Gain: Information Retrieval can utilize the clusters to relate a new document or search term to clustered documents.

Illustrating Document Clustering

Clustering Points: 3204 Articles Of Los Angles Times. Similarity Measure: How Many words are common in these documents. (after some word filtering) (Introduction to Data mining 2007)

Category
Financial Foreign National Metro Sports

Total Articles
555 341 273 943 738

Correctly Placed
364 260 36 746 573

Entertainment

354

278

Association Rule Discovery: Definition

Given

a set of records each of which contain some number of items from a given collection;
Apriori

principle: If an item set is frequent then its subset is also

TID 1 Items Bread, Coke Milk

frequent

2 3
4 5

Beer, Bread Beer,Coke, Diaper, Milk

Beer, Bread, Diaper, Milk Coke, Diaper, Milk

Rule Discovered: Milk -> Coke Diaper, Milk -> Beer

Other Mining Tasks in Nutshell

Sequential Pattern Discovery
In point-of-sale transaction sequences,

Computer Bookstore: (Intro_To_Visual_C) (C++_Primer) --> (Perl_for_dummies,Tcl_Tk)

Regression: Neural Networks Deviation Detection: Detect deviation from normal behavior. Eg. Credit card fraud.

Challenges of Data Mining

Scalability Dimensionality Complex and Heterogeneous Data Data Quality Data Ownership and Distribution Privacy Preservation Streaming Data

References
Tan, P., Steinbach, M., & Kumar, V., Introduction to Data Mining. Addison Wesley, 2006.