What is Data Mining

01-Apr-2022

Modern-day business involves collecting data at an alarming rate. This massive data stream comes from a variety of places. Credit card transactions, publicly available customer data, data from banks and financial organizations and the data that users must submit just to use and download an application on their laptops, mobile phones, tablets, and desktops could all be sources of information.

The amount of data available to us is so vast that processing and making sense of it is possible through Data Mining. Let us discover more about the real-world applications of data mining.

Explaining What is Data Mining?

The practice of discovering patterns and other insightful information from a large number of data sets is known as data mining. It is also referred to as knowledge discovery in data (KDD). The objective of data mining is to make data-driven judgments that are based on massive data sets. Predictive analysis, which is a branch of statistical science that uses complex algorithms to solve a specific set of issues, works in tandem with data mining. The predictive analysis first finds patterns in massive volumes of data, which data mining then generalizes to make predictions and forecasts. Data mining has a singular goal: to recognize patterns in datasets for a set of problems inside a specified domain.

What are the types of data mining

The practice and the process of data mining can be categorized into different types. 

Data is saved in a database

A database management system, or DBMS, is another name for a database. Every DBMS holds data that is connected to one another in some way. It also features a suite of software packages for managing data and facilitating access to it. These programs are used for a variety of tasks, including designing database structure, ensuring that stored data is secure and consistent, and managing various types of data access, including shared, distributed, and concurrent.

A relational database contains tables with unique names and properties that can hold rows or records from enormous data collections. A unique key is assigned to each record in a table. The entity-relationship model is designed to depict a relational database with entities and relationships that reside between them.

Data Warehouse A data warehouse is a single data storage site that gathers data from a variety of sources and organizes it into a coherent strategy. Data is cleaned, integrated, loaded, and refreshed before being stored in a data warehouse. The data stored in a data warehouse is divided into numerous sections. You'll obtain a summary if you request information on data that was stored six or twelve months ago.

Transactional Data

A transactional database is a database that stores record that has been captured as transactions. Flight bookings, consumer purchases, website clicks, and other transactions are examples of these types of transactions. A unique ID is assigned to each transaction record. It also includes a list of all the elements that made the transaction possible.

Other Types

There are other sorts of data that are recognized for their structure, semantic meanings, and versatility. They're employed in a variety of situations. Here are some examples of data types: Data streams, sequence data, graph data, engineering design data, spatial data, multimedia data, and other types of data are all available.

Data Mining Techniques

Extracting meaningful information out of the enormous sets of data requires employing various methodologies and techniques. Some of the major techniques of data mining are discussed below: 

Association Rules: This is a method for discovering correlations between variables in a dataset that is based on rules. This method is typically employed by Market basket analysis which assists organizations or corporates to gain a better understanding of the link between different items. Understanding the customer's consumption behaviors helps in developing stronger cross-selling strategies and recommendations algorithms.

Neural networks: These techniques are used to handle training data by simulating the interconnection of the human brain via layers of nodes. Each node is made up of Inputs, a Bias (threshold), weights, and an Output. In the event of the output value reaching a certain threshold, the node gets activated or fires and sends data to the next layer networks. Neural networks learn the mapping function through supervised training. It is followed by altering based on the loss function by utilizing gradient descent. When the cost function reaches Zero or is near Zero, it signifies the accuracy of the model's potential of giving an accurate answer. 

Decision tree: This data mining technique classifies or predicts potential outcomes based on a collection of decisions using classification or regression methods. The method employs a tree-like image in order to demonstrate the potential results of these decisions.

K-nearest neighbour (KNN) 

It is a non-parametric technique that classifies data points based on their proximity and relationship to other available data. This technique works on the assumption of comparable data points as discoverable close together. Hence, it attempts to determine the distance between data points. This is commonly done by employing Euclidean distance, and then assigning a category based on the most common category or average.

Application of Data Mining

If you are wondering what is data mining used for, has expansive applications across multiple sectors. The major industries that use data mining are-

• Sales and marketing

• Education

• Operational optimization

• Fraud detection

•  Healthcare

• Customer relationship management (CRM)

• Manufacturing engineering

• Finance and banking

Data mining has improved and enhanced corporates and firms in decision-making by employing smart data analytics. The data mining approaches employed in this research can be categorized into two parts: those that characterize the target dataset and those that use machine learning algorithms to anticipate results. With the application of these methods, revealing the most valuable information has upgraded from detecting frauds to user behavior, drawbacks, and security breaches.

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