Data Mining Essay

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1.2 What is Data Mining?

Structure of Data Mining

Generally, data mining can be associated with classes and concepts. data mining (sometimes called data or knowledge discovery) is the process of analyzing data from different perspectives and summarizing it into useful information - information that can be used to increase revenue, cuts costs, or both. Data mining software is the best analytical tools for analyzing data. It allows users to analyze data from many different dimensions or angles, categorize it, and summarize the relationships identified. Technically, data mining is the process of finding correlations or patterns among the dozen fields in large relational databases.

1.2.1 How Data Mining Works?
While large-scale information …show more content…

For example, a restaurant chain could mine customer purchase data to determine when customers visit and what they typically order. This information could be used to increase traffic by having daily specials.

Clusters: Data items are grouped according to logical relationships or consumer preferences. For example, data can be mined to identify market segments or consumer affinities.

Associations: Data can be mined to identify associations. The beer-diaper example is an example of associative mining.

Sequential patterns: Data is mined to anticipate behavior patterns and trends. For example, an outdoor equipment retailer could predict the likelihood of a backpack being purchased based on a consumer's purchase of sleeping bags and hiking shoes.

1.2.2 Data mining consists of five major elements:
• Extract, transform, and load transaction data onto the data warehouse system.
• Store and manage the data in a multidimensional database system.
• Provide data access to business analysts and information technology professionals.
• Analyze the data by application software.
• Present the data in a useful format, such as a graph or …show more content…

Decision trees: Tree-shaped structures that represent sets of decisions. These decisions generate rules for the classification of a dataset. Specific decision tree methods include Classification and Regression Trees (CART) and Chi Square Automatic Interaction Detection (CHAID). CART and CHAID are decision tree techniques used for classification of a dataset. They provide a set of rules that you can apply to a new (unclassified) dataset to predict which records will have a given outcome. CART segments a dataset by creating 2-way splits while CHAID segments using chi square tests to create multi-way splits. CART typically requires less data preparation than CHAID.
Nearest neighbor method: A technique that classifies each record in a dataset based on a combination of the classes of the k record(s) most similar to it in a historical dataset (where k=1). Sometimes called the k-nearest neighbor technique.
Rule induction: The extraction of useful if-then rules from data based on statistical

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