Reading Material on Data Mining Anas AP & Alex Titty John
• What is Data?
Data is a collection of facts and information or unprocessed information.
Example: Student names, Addresses, Phone Numbers etc.
• What is a Database?
A structured set of data held in a computer which is accessible in various ways.
Example: Electronic Address Book, Phone Book.
• What is a Data Warehouse?
The electronic storage of large amount of data by business.
Concept originated in 1988
IBM researchers Barry Devlin & Paul Murphy
Used in business for DATA MINING & data exploration
Data warehouse is a decision support database that is maintained separately from the organization 's operational data base.
Supports Information processing, by providing a solid platform of consolidated, historical data for analysis.
“A process of transforming data into information and making it available to users in a timely enough manner to make a difference”
[Forrester Research, April 1996]
• What is Data Mining?
“Data mining is the analysis of (often large) observational data sets to find unsuspected relationships and to summarize the data in novel ways that are both understandable and useful to the data owner.”
Data mining is the exploration and analysis of large quantities of data in order to discover valid, novel, potentially useful and understandable patterns in data.
Valid: The patterns are true.
Novel: We did not know the pattern beforehand.
Useful: We can devise actions from the patterns.
Understandable: We can interpret and comprehend the patterns.
The relationships and summaries derived through a data mining exercise are often referred to as models or patterns.
Examples include linear equations, rules, clusters, graphs, tree structures, and patterns in time series • What’s the difference between data mining and data warehousing
Data mining is the process of finding patterns in a given data set. These patterns can often
References: Principles of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, Osmar R. Zaïane, 1999 | Principles of Data Mining by David Hand Heikki Mannila & Padhraic Smyth |