Pattern mining
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- Lifewire - What is Data Mining?
- Corporate Finance Institute - Data Mining
- University of Texas - Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services - Data Mining
- Academia - A Study of Data Mining Techniques And Its Applications
- National Center for Biotechnology Information - PubMed Central - Data mining in clinical big data: the frequently used databases, steps, and methodological models
- Workforce LibreTexts - Data Mining
- IBM - Data Mining
- Also called:
- knowledge discovery in databases
- Related Topics:
- Internet of Things
- surveillance capitalism
- data
Pattern mining concentrates on identifying rules that describe specific patterns within the data. Market-basket analysis, which identifies items that typically occur together in purchase transactions, was one of the first applications of data mining. For example, supermarkets used market-basket analysis to identify items that were often purchased together—for instance, a store featuring a fish sale would also stock up on tartar sauce. Although testing for such associations has long been feasible and is often simple to see in small data sets, data mining has enabled the discovery of less apparent associations in immense data sets. Of most interest is the discovery of unexpected associations, which may open new avenues for marketing or research. Another important use of pattern mining is the discovery of sequential patterns; for example, sequences of errors or warnings that precede an equipment failure may be used to schedule preventative maintenance or may provide insight into a design flaw.
Anomaly detection
Anomaly detection can be viewed as the flip side of clustering—that is, finding data instances that are unusual and do not fit any established pattern. Fraud detection is an example of anomaly detection. Although fraud detection may be viewed as a problem for predictive modeling, the relative rarity of fraudulent transactions and the speed with which criminals develop new types of fraud mean that any predictive model is likely to be of low accuracy and to quickly become out of date. Thus, anomaly detection instead concentrates on modeling what is normal behaviour in order to identify unusual transactions. Anomaly detection also is used with various monitoring systems, such as for intrusion detection.
Numerous other data-mining techniques have been developed, including pattern discovery in time series data (e.g., stock prices), streaming data (e.g., sensor networks), and relational learning (e.g., social networks).
Privacy concerns and future directions
The potential for invasion of privacy using data mining has been a concern for many people. Commercial databases may contain detailed records of people’s medical history, purchase transactions, and telephone usage, among other aspects of their lives. Civil libertarians consider some databases held by businesses and governments to be an unwarranted intrusion and an invitation to abuse. For example, the American Civil Liberties Union sued the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) alleging warrantless spying on American citizens through the acquisition of call records from some American telecommunication companies. The program, which began in 2001, was not discovered by the public until 2006, when the information began to leak out. Often the risk is not from data mining itself (which usually aims to produce general knowledge rather than to learn information about specific issues) but from misuse or inappropriate disclosure of information in these databases.
In the United States, many federal agencies are now required to produce annual reports that specifically address the privacy implications of their data-mining projects. The U.S. law requiring privacy reports from federal agencies defines data mining quite restrictively as “…analyses to discover or locate a predictive pattern or anomaly indicative of terrorist or criminal activity on the part of any individual or individuals.” As various local, national, and international law-enforcement agencies have begun to share or integrate their databases, the potential for abuse or security breaches has forced governments to work with industry on developing more secure computers and networks. In particular, there has been research in techniques for privacy-preserving data mining that operate on distorted, transformed, or encrypted data to decrease the risk of disclosure of any individual’s data.
Data mining is evolving, with one driver being competitions on challenge problems. A commercial example of this was the $1 million Netflix Prize. Netflix, an American company that offers movie rentals delivered by mail or streamed over the Internet, began the contest in 2006 to see if anyone could improve by 10 percent its recommendation system, an algorithm for predicting an individual’s movie preferences based on previous rental data. The prize was awarded on Sept. 21, 2009, to BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos—a team of seven mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers from the United States, Canada, Austria, and Israel who had achieved the 10 percent goal on June 26, 2009, and finalized their victory with an improved algorithm 30 days later. The three-year open competition had spurred many clever data-mining innovations from contestants. For example, the 2007 and 2008 Conferences on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining held workshops on the Netflix Prize, at which research papers were presented on topics ranging from new collaborative filtering techniques to faster matrix factorization (a key component of many recommendation systems). Concerns over privacy of such data have also led to advances in understanding privacy and anonymity.
Data mining is not a panacea, however, and results must be viewed with the same care as with any statistical analysis. One of the strengths of data mining is the ability to analyze quantities of data that would be impractical to analyze manually, and the patterns found may be complex and difficult for humans to understand; this complexity requires care in evaluating the patterns. Nevertheless, statistical evaluation techniques can result in knowledge that is free from human bias, and the large amount of data can reduce biases inherent in smaller samples. Used properly, data mining provides valuable insights into large data sets that otherwise would not be practical or possible to obtain.
Christopher Clifton