Table of Contents
Data Mining
What is data mining ?
Data mining try to discover in data unknown:
- unexpected patterns
- and relationships.
Data mining is becoming an increasingly important tool to transform data into a wide range of profiling practices, such as:
- marketing,
- surveillance,
- fraud detection
- and scientific discovery.
Inportance of the sample
While data mining can be used to uncover patterns in data samples, it is important to be aware that:
- the use of non-representative samples of data may produce results that are not indicative of the domain.
- data mining will not find patterns that may be present in the domain, if those patterns are not present in the sample being “mined”. Data mining will only functions with indicative and representative data
Validation of the pattern
Further, the discovery of a particular pattern in a particular set of data does not necessarily mean that pattern is representative of the whole population from which that data was drawn. Hence, an important part of the process is the verification and validation of patterns on other samples of data.
