Data Mining: What is Data Mining?

Generally, Data mining, a branch of computer science, is the process of extracting patterns from large data sets by combining methods from statistics and artificial intelligence with database management. Data mining is seen as an increasingly important tool by modern business to transform data into business intelligence giving an informational advantage. It is currently used in a wide range of profiling practices, .such as marketing, surveillance, fraud detection, and scientific discovery 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 one of a number of 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 dozens of fields in large relational databases Data mining, the extraction of hidden predictive information from large databases, is a powerful new technology with great potential to help companies focus on the most important information in their data warehouses. Data mining tools predict future trends and behaviors, allowing businesses to make proactive, knowledge-driven decisions. The automated, prospective analyses offered by data mining move beyond the analyses of past events provided by retrospective tools typical of decision support systems. Data mining tools can answer business questions that traditionally were too time consuming to resolve. They scour databases for hidden patterns, finding predictive information that experts may miss because it lies outside their expectations. .

There are many targets for data mining:

*The exploration in the databases is designed to extract information hidden, namely, the modern technology, have become important in light of the rapid development and widespread use of databases and competition in the market and others. * Provides the use of institutions and security services in all areas, the ability to explore, and focus on the most important information in the databases. * Exploration techniques focus on building future predictions and explore the behavior and trends, allowing assessment of the right decisions and taken in a timely manner. * Answer Mining Techniques to the many questions, and in record time, especially those types of questions that were difficult to answer, if not impossible, using the techniques of statistics classic, which, if any, it takes a long time and many of the analysis procedures.

Reasons for the growth applications drilling:

Applications of data mining began to grow significantly for the following reasons: 1) the amount of data in the data store and data market is growing very large, if there is information environment great pay those interested to take advantage of them. 2) the emergence of many effective exploration tools, encouraged to increase the process of data mining in abundance. 3) intense competition in the market for companies to look for ways to help them succeed at low cost, then so they began using customer data to attract them to Daihm, through their movements and identify their needs and their personal information, and all this through the exploration in their statements by using the methods of technical

How does data mining work?

Data mining is a subset of business intelligence, which covers a broad range of analytics technologies. Often used for predictive modeling, data mining tools can also help organizations better understand relationships among variables. One core software tool is online analytical processing (OLAP), which extracts, structures and stores warehoused data to enable quick, multidimensional analysis. A dimension can be any variable your company tracks: customer locations, sales volumes, product development costs and so on. An OLAP data set is made up of dimensions and measures, which can then be used for queries to elicit detailed data breakdowns and information on associations among variables. For example, a grill manufacturer could use an OLAP query to correlate grill sales with weather conditions across various locations, to determine how heat waves affect its business in different regions.

Data mining commonly involves four classes of tasks:

Clustering is the task of discovering groups and structures in the data that are in some way or another "similar", without using known structures in the data. Classification is the task of generalizing known structure to apply to new data. For example, an email program might attempt to classify an email as legitimate or spam. Common algorithms include decision tree learning, nearest neighbor, naive Bayesian classification, neural networks and support vector machines. Regression Attempts to find a function which models the data with the least error. Association rule learning Searches for relationships between variables

An Architecture for Data Mining

To best apply these advanced techniques, they must be fully integrated with a data warehouse as well as flexible interactive business analysis tools. Many data mining tools currently operate outside of the warehouse, requiring extra steps for extracting, importing, and analyzing the data. Furthermore, when new insights require operational implementation, integration with the warehouse simplifies the application of results from data mining. The resulting analytic data warehouse can be applied to improve business processes throughout the organization, in areas such as promotional campaign management, fraud detection, new product rollout.

The data mining process

Data mining is an iterative process that typically involves the following phases: Problem definition A data mining project starts with the understanding of the business problem. Data mining experts, business experts, and domain experts work closely together to define the project objectives and the requirements from a business perspective. The project objective is then translated into a data mining problem definition. In the problem definition phase, data mining tools are not yet required. Data exploration Domain experts understand the meaning of the metadata. They collect, describe, and explore the data. They also identify quality problems of the data. A frequent exchange with the data mining experts and the business experts from the problem definition phase is vital. In the data exploration phase, traditional data analysis tools, for example, statistics, are used to explore the data.

Data preparation Domain experts build the data model for the modeling process. They collect, cleanse, and format the data because some of the mining functions accept data only in a certain format. They also create new derived attributes, for example, an average value. In the data preparation phase, data is tweaked multiple times in no prescribed order. Preparing the data for the modeling tool by selecting tables, records, and attributes, are typical tasks in this phase. The meaning of the data is not changed. Modeling Data mining experts select and apply various mining functions because you can use different mining functions for the same type of data mining problem. Some of the mining functions require specific data types. The data mining experts must assess each model.

In the modeling phase, a frequent exchange with the domain experts from the data preparation phase is required. The modeling phase and the evaluation phase are coupled. They can be repeated several times to change parameters until optimal values are achieved. When the final modeling phase is completed, a model of high quality has been built. Evaluation Data mining experts evaluate the model. If the model does not satisfy their expectations, they go back to the modeling phase and rebuild the model by changing its parameters until optimal values are achieved. When they are finally satisfied with the model, they can extract business explanations and evaluate the following questions:

Does the model achieve the business objective? Have all business issues been considered?

At the end of the evaluation phase, the data mining experts decide how to use the data mining results. Deployment Data mining experts use the mining results by exporting the results into database tables or into other applications, for example, spreadsheets. The Intelligent Miner products assist you to follow this process. You can apply the functions of the Intelligent Miner products independently, iteratively, or in combination. The following figure shows the phases of the Cross Industry Standard Process for data mining (CRISP DM) process model.