Introduction to Data Mining

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 What Is Data Mining?
 We live in a world where vast amounts of data are generated constantly and rapidly
Data mining is the process of discovering interesting patterns, models and other
kinds of knowledge in large data sets
 “Data mining”: a misnomer? It should be “knowledge mining from data”

 Other terms: Knowledge mining from data, KDD (Knowledge Discovery from Data),
pattern discovery, knowledge extraction, data analytics, information harvesting
 Data mining is a young, dynamic, and promising field
Example: Data mining turns a large collection of data into knowledge
 Google’s Flu Trends found a close relationship between the number of people who
search for flu-related info. and the number of people who have flu symptoms
 It can estimate flu activity up to two weeks faster than traditional systems

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 Data Mining: An Essential Step in Knowledge
Discovery

 Knowledge Discovery Process

 Data preparation
 Data cleaning
 Data integration
 Data transformation
 Data selection
 Data mining
 Pattern/model evaluation
 Knowledge presentation
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 Diversity of Data Types for Data Mining (I)
 Structured vs. unstructured data
 Structured: uniform, record- or table-like structures, defined by data dictionaries, with a
fixed set of attributes, each with a fixed set of value ranges and semantic meaning
 Ex. Data stored in relational databases, data cubes, data matrices, and many data
warehouses
 Semi-structured: allow a data object to contain a set value, a small set of heterogeneous
typed values, or nested structures, or to allow the structure of objects or sub-objects to be
defined flexibly and dynamically
 Data having certain structures with clearly defined semantic meaning, such as transactional
data set, sequence data set (e.g., time-series data, gene or protein data, or Weblog data)
 Graph or network data: A more sophisticated type of semi-structured data set
 Unstructured data: text data and multimedia (e.g., audio, image, video) data
 The real-world data can often be a mixture of structured, semi-structured data and
unstructured data
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 Diversity of Data Types for Data Mining (II)
 Data associated with different applications
 Different applications: different data sets and require different data analysis methods
 Sequence data: Biological sequences vs. shopping transaction sequences
 Time-series: ordered set of numerical values with equal time interval
 Spatial, temporal and spatiotemporal data
 Graph and network data: Social networks, computer communication networks, biological
networks, and information networks may carry rather different semantics
 On the same data set, finding different kinds of patterns: require different mining methods
 Ex. software programs: finding plagiarized modules vs. finding copy-and-paste bugs
 Stored vs. streaming data

 Stored data: Finite, stored in various kinds of large data repositories

 Streaming data (e.g., video surveillance or remote sensing): Dynamic, constantly coming,
infinite, real-time response―posing challenges on effective data mining
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 Mining Various Kinds of Knowledge
 Multidimensional Data Summarization

 Mining Frequent Patterns, Associations, and Correlations

 Classification and Regression for Predictive Analysis

 Cluster Analysis

 Deep Learning

 Outlier Analysis

 Are All Mining Results Interesting?

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 Multidimensional Data Summarization

 Information integration and data warehouse construction

 Data cleaning, transformation, integration, and
multidimensional data model
 Data cube technology
 Scalable methods for computing (i.e., materializing)
multidimensional aggregates
 OLAP (online analytical processing)
 Multidimensional concept description: Characterization
and discrimination
 Generalize, summarize, and contrast data characteristics,
e.g., dry vs. wet region
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 Pattern Discovery: Mining Frequent Patterns, Associations, and Correlations

 Frequent patterns (or frequent itemsets)

 What items are frequently purchased together in your Walmart?
 Association and Correlation Analysis

 A typical association rule

 Diaper  Beer [0.5%, 75%] (support, confidence)
 Are strongly associated items also strongly correlated?
 How to mine such patterns and rules efficiently in large datasets?
 How to use such patterns for classification, clustering, and other applications?
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 Classification and Regression for

 Predictive
Classification and label prediction
Analysis
 Construct models (functions) based on some training examples
 Describe and distinguish classes or concepts for future prediction
 Ex. 1. Classify countries based on (climate)
 Ex. 2. Classify cars based on (gas mileage)
 Predict some unknown class labels
 Typical methods
 Decision trees, naïve Bayesian classification, support vector machines, neural
networks, rule-based classification, pattern-based classification, logistic regression,
…
 Typical applications:
 Credit card fraud detection, direct marketing, classifying stars, diseases, web-
pages, …
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 Cluster Analysis
 Unsupervised learning (i.e., Class label is
unknown)
 Group data to form new categories (i.e.,
clusters), e.g., cluster houses to find
distribution patterns
 Principle: Maximizing intra-class similarity &
minimizing interclass similarity
 Many methods and applications

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 Deep Learning
 Deep learning: A fast expanding dynamic frontier in machine learning
 Deep learning has developed various neural network architectures
 Feed-forward neural networks
 Convolutional neural networks
 Recurrent neural networks
 Graph neural networks
 Transformer
 Deep learning has broad applications in computer vision, natural language
processing, machine translation, social network analysis, and so on
 Deep learning has been reshaping a variety of data mining tasks
 Ex. classification, clustering, outlier detection, and reinforcement learning
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 Outlier Analysis
 Outlier analysis
 Outlier: A data object that does not comply with the general
behavior of the data
 Noise or exception?―One person’s garbage could be
another person’s treasure
 Methods: by product of clustering or regression analysis, …
 Useful in fraud detection, rare events analysis

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 Other Data Mining Functions: Time and
Ordering: Sequential Pattern, Trend and
Evolution Analysis
 Sequence, trend and evolution analysis
 Trend, time-series, and deviation analysis
 e.g., regression and value prediction
 Sequential pattern mining
 e.g., buy digital camera, then buy large memory cards
 Periodicity analysis
 Motifs and biological sequence analysis
 Approximate and consecutive motifs
 Similarity-based analysis
 Mining data streams
 Ordered, time-varying, potentially infinite, data streams

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 Other Data Mining Functions: Structure and
Network Analysis
 Graph mining
 Finding frequent subgraphs (e.g., chemical compounds), trees (XML),
substructures (web fragments)
 Information network analysis
 Social networks: actors (objects, nodes) and relationships (edges)
 e.g., author networks in CS, terrorist networks
 Multiple heterogeneous networks
 A person could be multiple information networks: friends, family, classmates, …
 Links carry a lot of semantic information: Link mining
 Web mining
 Web is a big information network: from PageRank to Google
 Analysis of Web information networks
 Web community discovery, opinion mining, usage mining, …
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 Evaluation of Knowledge
 Are all mined knowledge interesting?
 One can mine tremendous amount of “patterns”
 Some may fit only certain dimension space (time, location, …)
 Some may not be representative, may be transient, …
 Evaluation of mined knowledge → directly mining only interesting knowledge?
 Descriptive vs. predictive
 Coverage
 Typicality vs. novelty
 Accuracy
 Timeliness

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 …
 Data Mining: Confluence of Multiple
Disciplines

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 Why Confluence of Multiple Disciplines?
 Tremendous amount of data
 Algorithms must be scalable to handle big data
 High-dimensionality of data
 Micro-array may have tens of thousands of dimensions
 High complexity of data
 Data streams and sensor data
 Time-series data, temporal data, sequence data
 Structure data, graphs, social and information networks
 Spatial, spatiotemporal, multimedia, text and Web data
 Software programs, scientific simulations
 New and sophisticated applications

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 Data Mining and Applications
 Web page analysis: classification, clustering, ranking
 Collaborative analysis & recommender systems
 Basket data analysis to targeted marketing
 Biological and medical data analysis
 Data mining and software engineering
 Data mining and text analysis
 Data mining and social and information network analysis
 Built-in (invisible data mining) functions in Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Meta, …
 Major dedicated data mining systems/tools
 SAS, MS SQL-Server Analysis Manager, Oracle Data Mining Tools)
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 Data Mining and Society
 Data mining technology may benefit society
 Ex.: Help scientific discovery, business management, economy recovery, and
security protection (e.g., the real-time discovery of intruders and cyberattacks)
 Need to guard against the misuse of data mining
 Data mining also poses the risk of unintentionally disclosing some confidential
business or government information and disclosing an individual’s personal
information
 Studies on data security in data mining and privacy-preserving data publishing and
data mining are important, ongoing research theme
 The philosophy is to observe data sensitivity and preserve data security and
people’s privacy while performing successful data mining
 These and other related issues will be discussed throughout the book

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 Summary
 Data mining: Discovering interesting patterns and knowledge from massive amounts
of data
 A KDD process includes data cleaning, data integration, data selection,
transformation, data mining, pattern evaluation, and knowledge presentation
 Different data mining method on a wide variety of data
 Data mining functionalities: summarization, pattern discovery, classification,
clustering, deep learning, outlier analysis, trend and outlier analysis, …
 Data mining is a confluence of multiple disciplines
 Data mining has broad applications
 Promote secure data mining to benefit society

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