Data Mining's Importance in Today's Corporate Industry

Data Mining's Importance in Today's Corporate Industry

A large amount of information is collected normally in business, government departments and research & development organizations. They are typically stored in large information warehouses or bases. For data mining tasks suitable data has to be extracted, linked, cleaned and integrated with external sources. In other words, it is the retrieval of useful information from large masses of information, which is also presented in an analyzed form for specific decision-making.

Data mining is the automated analysis of large information sets to find patterns and trends that might otherwise go undiscovered. It is largely used in several applications such as understanding consumer research marketing, product analysis, demand and supply analysis, telecommunications and so on. Data Mining is based on mathematical algorithm and analytical skills to drive the desired results from the huge database collection.

It can be technically defined as the automated mining of hidden information from large databases for predictive analysis. Web mining requires the use of mathematical algorithms and statistical techniques integrated with software tools.

Data mining includes a number of different technical approaches, such as:

-  Clustering
-  Data Summarization
-  Learning Classification Rules
-  Finding Dependency Networks
-  Analyzing Changes
-  Detecting Anomalies

The software enables users to analyze large databases to provide solutions to business decision problems. Data mining is a technology and not a business solution like statistics. Thus the data mining software provides an idea about the customers that would be intrigued by the new product.

It is available in various forms like text, web, audio & video data mining, pictorial data mining, relational databases, and social networks. Data mining is thus also known as Knowledge Discovery in Databases since it involves searching for implicit information in large databases. The main kinds of data mining software are: clustering and segmentation software, statistical analysis software, text analysis, mining and information retrieval software and visualization software.

Data Mining therefore has arrived on the scene at the very appropriate time, helping these enterprises to achieve a number of complex tasks that would have taken up ages but for the advent of this marvelous new technology.

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Data Mining Introduction

Data Mining Introduction

Introduction

We have been "manually" extracting data in relation to the patterns they form for many years but as the volume of data and the varied sources from which we obtain it grow a more automatic approach is required.

The cause and solution to this increase in data to be processed has been because the increasing power of computer technology has increased data collection and storage. Direct hands-on data analysis has increasingly been supplemented, or even replaced entirely, by indirect, automatic data processing. Data mining is the process uncovering hidden data patterns and has been used by businesses, scientists and governments for years to produce market research reports. A primary use for data mining is to analyse patterns of behaviour.

It can be easily be divided into stages

Pre-processing

Once the objective for the data that has been deemed to be useful and able to be interpreted is known, a target data set has to be assembled. Logically data mining can only discover data patterns that already exist in the collected data, therefore the target dataset must be able to contain these patterns but small enough to be able to succeed in its objective within an acceptable time frame.

The target set then has to be cleansed. This removes sources that have noise and missing data.

The clean data is then reduced into feature vectors,(a summarized version of the raw data source) at a rate of one vector per source. The feature vectors are then split into two sets, a "training set" and a "test set". The training set is used to "train" the data mining algorithm(s), while the test set is used to verify the accuracy of any patterns found.

Data mining

Data mining commonly involves four classes of task:

Classification - Arranges the data into predefined groups. For example email could be classified as legitimate or spam.
Clustering - Arranges data in groups defined by algorithms that attempt to group similar items together
Regression - Attempts to find a function which models the data with the least error.
Association rule learning - Searches for relationships between variables. Often used in supermarkets to work out what products are frequently bought together. This information can then be used for marketing purposes.

Validation of Results

The final stage is to verify that the patterns produced by the data mining algorithms occur in the wider data set as not all patterns found by the data mining algorithms are necessarily valid.

If the patterns do not meet the required standards, then the preprocessing and data mining stages have to be re-evaluated. When the patterns meet the required standards then these patterns can be turned into knowledge.

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