Data Preparation For Data Mining

This book focuses on the importance of clean, well-structured data as the first step to successful data mining. It shows how data should be prepared prior to mining in order to maximize mining performance.

Are you a data mining analyst, who spends up to 80% of your time assuring data quality, then preparing that data for developing and deploying predictive models? And do you find lots of literature on data mining theory and concepts, but when it comes to practical advice on developing good mining views find little “how to information? And are you, like most analysts, preparing the data in SAS? This book is intended to fill this gap as your source of practical recipes. It introduces a framework for the process of data preparation for data mining, and presents the detailed implementation of each step in SAS. In addition, business applications of data mining modeling require you to deal with a large number of variables, typically hundreds if not thousands. Therefore, the book devotes several chapters to the methods of data transformation and variable selection. A complete framework for the data preparation process, including implementation details for each step. The complete SAS implementation code, which is readily usable by professional analysts and data miners. A unique and comprehensive approach for the treatment of missing values, optimal binning, and cardinality reduction. Assumes minimal proficiency in SAS and includes a quick-start chapter on writing SAS macros.

Effective decision support systems (DSS) are quickly becoming key to businesses gaining a competitive advantage, and the effectiveness of these systems depends on the ability to construct, maintain, and extract information from data warehouses. While many still perceive data warehousing as a subdiscipline of management information systems (MIS), in fact many of its advances have and will continue to come from the computer science arena. Intelligent Data Warehousing presents the state of the art in data warehousing research and practice from a perspective that integrates business applications and computer science. It brings the intelligent techniques associated with artificial intelligence (AI) to the entire process of data warehousing, including data preparation, storage, and mining. Part I provides an overview of the main ideas and fundamentals of data mining, artificial intelligence, business intelligence, and data warehousing. Part II presents core materials on data warehousing, and Part III explores data analysis and knowledge discovery in the data warehousing environment, including how to perform intelligent data analysis and the discovery of influential association patterns. Bridging the gap between theoretical research and business applications, this book summarizes the main ideas behind recent research developments rather than setting forth technical details, and it presents case studies that show the how-to's of implementing these ideas. The result is a practical, first-of-its-kind book that brings together scattered research, unites MIS with computer science, and melds intelligent techniques with data warehousing.

Data Preprocessing for Data Mining addresses one of the most important issues within the well-known Knowledge Discovery from Data process. Data directly taken from the source will likely have inconsistencies, errors or most importantly, it is not ready to be considered for a data mining process. Furthermore, the increasing amount of data in recent science, industry and business applications, calls to the requirement of more complex tools to analyze it. Thanks to data preprocessing, it is possible to convert the impossible into possible, adapting the data to fulfill the input demands of each data mining algorithm. Data preprocessing includes the data reduction techniques, which aim at reducing the complexity of the data, detecting or removing irrelevant and noisy elements from the data. This book is intended to review the tasks that fill the gap between the data acquisition from the source and the data mining process. A comprehensive look from a practical point of view, including basic concepts and surveying the techniques proposed in the specialized literature, is given.Each chapter is a stand-alone guide to a particular data preprocessing topic, from basic concepts and detailed descriptions of classical algorithms, to an incursion of an exhaustive catalog of recent developments. The in-depth technical descriptions make this book suitable for technical professionals, researchers, senior undergraduate and graduate students in data science, computer science and engineering.

Data mining is well on its way to becoming a recognized discipline in the overlapping areas of IT, statistics, machine learning, and AI. Practical Data Mining for Business presents a user-friendly approach to data mining methods, covering the typical uses to which it is applied. The methodology is complemented by case studies to create a versatile reference book, allowing readers to look for specific methods as well as for specific applications. The book is formatted to allow statisticians, computer scientists, and economists to cross-reference from a particular application or method to sectors of interest.

Data mining is the art and science of intelligent data analysis. By building knowledge from information, data mining adds considerable value to the ever increasing stores of electronic data that abound today. In performing data mining many decisions need to be made regarding the choice of methodology, the choice of data, the choice of tools, and the choice of algorithms. Throughout this book the reader is introduced to the basic concepts and some of the more popular algorithms of data mining. With a focus on the hands-on end-to-end process for data mining, Williams guides the reader through various capabilities of the easy to use, free, and open source Rattle Data Mining Software built on the sophisticated R Statistical Software. The focus on doing data mining rather than just reading about data mining is refreshing. The book covers data understanding, data preparation, data refinement, model building, model evaluation, and practical deployment. The reader will learn to rapidly deliver a data mining project using software easily installed for free from the Internet. Coupling Rattle with R delivers a very sophisticated data mining environment with all the power, and more, of the many commercial offerings.

Due to the popularity of knowledge discovery and data mining, in practice as well as among academic and corporate R&D professionals, association rule mining is receiving increasing attention. The authors present the recent progress achieved in mining quantitative association rules, causal rules, exceptional rules, negative association rules, association rules in multi-databases, and association rules in small databases. This book is written for researchers, professionals, and students working in the fields of data mining, data analysis, machine learning, knowledge discovery in databases, and anyone who is interested in association rule mining.

A practical, step-by-step approach to making sense out of data Making Sense of Data educates readers on the steps and issues that need to be considered in order to successfully complete a data analysis or data mining project. The author provides clear explanations that guide the reader to make timely and accurate decisions from data in almost every field of study. A step-by-step approach aids professionals in carefully analyzing data and implementing results, leading to the development of smarter business decisions. With a comprehensive collection of methods from both data analysis and data mining disciplines, this book successfully describes the issues that need to be considered, the steps that need to be taken, and appropriately treats technical topics to accomplish effective decision making from data. Readers are given a solid foundation in the procedures associated with complex data analysis or data mining projects and are provided with concrete discussions of the most universal tasks and technical solutions related to the analysis of data, including: * Problem definitions * Data preparation * Data visualization * Data mining * Statistics * Grouping methods * Predictive modeling * Deployment issues and applications Throughout the book, the author examines why these multiple approaches are needed and how these methods will solve different problems. Processes, along with methods, are carefully and meticulously outlined for use in any data analysis or data mining project. From summarizing and interpreting data, to identifying non-trivial facts, patterns, and relationships in the data, to making predictions from the data, Making Sense of Data addresses the many issues that need to be considered as well as the steps that need to be taken to master data analysis and mining.