Data Mining : Features , Process and Tools
What is Data Mining ?
- Data Mining is the process of cleaning data of noise and redundancy, extracting the useful information that can help in to make smarter business decisions.
- This process uses mining algorithms on data assembled in data warehouses to identify hidden patterns and uncover valuable findings
- The goal is to use advanced analytics and data mining algorithms to make data usable.
- It is applicable in every organization where a big or even small amount of data available.
- It is also called as data discovery.
- This can be applied on a variety of data stores, the World Wide Web, relational databases, transactional databases, pdf documents etc.
- It results can help organization and governments cut costs or increase revenue.
- If you’ve ever shopped at any store and received coupons, that’s a result of mining because your each purchase history was analyzed to find out what products you’ve been buying and what promotions you’re likely to be interested in.
Features of Data mining:
- Automatic pattern predictions based on trend and behaviour analysis.
- It helps government agency by digging and analyzing records of financial transaction to build patterns that can detect money laundering or criminal activities.
- Prediction based on likely outcomes.
- Ability to automate and string together complex workflows of various processes to achieve the outcome
- Creation of decision-oriented information.
- Increases brand loyalty.
- Focus on large data sets and databases for analysis.
Data Mining Process:
It’s a highly iterative process, and I look at it as involving:
- Data collection :-collecting the basic information you need.
- Data extraction :-pulling out the potentially useful pieces of information from the mass of raw data you have
- Data evaluation :-figuring out what you have extracted
- Data refinement :- based on what you have, figuring out what else you need to do in order to get a better final product
Types of data that can be mined
- Transactional data
- Data warehouse
- Text databases
- Multimedia and streaming database
- Relational databases
- Engineering design data
- Sequence data
- Graph data etc
Data Mining tools:
Few of the the tools are given below
- Enterprise Miner – SAS
- BusinessMiner – SAP/Business Objects
- Weka
- See5 – RuleQuest Research
- SQL Server Analysis Services – Microsoft.