Data Mining: A Review

Pramod Vishwakarma*,
M. Tech. (CSE), CET Moradabad, MTU Noida, U.P., India. param.vish@gmail.com

Yogesh Kumar**,
M. Tech. (CSE), CET Moradabad, MTU Noida, U.P., India. reply.yogesh@gmail.com

Prof. Rajiv Kumar Nath***,

Dept. of Computer Science, CET Moradabad, U.P., India. rajivknath@gmail.com

Abstract- This review paper provides an overview of Data Warehouse, Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD), KDD Process, Data Mining and issues related to Data Mining. Data mining has attracted a great deal of attention in the information industry and in society as a whole in recent years, due to the wide availability of huge amounts of data and the imminent need for turning such data into useful information and knowledge. The explosive growth in data and databases has generated an urgent need for new techniques and tools that can intelligently and automatically transform the processed data into useful information and knowledge. Several emerging applications in information providing services, such as data warehousing and on-line services over the Internet, also call for various data mining techniques to better understand user behavior, to improve the service provided, and to increase the business opportunities. In response to such a demand, this article is to provide a survey, from a database researcher's point of view, on the data mining techniques developed recently. A classification of the available data mining techniques is provided and a comparative study of such techniques is presented Keywords Data Warehousing, KDD, Data Mining, Data Mining Issues

information and helpful knowledge from these large databases has thus evolved into an important research. Among the areas of data mining, the problem of deriving associations from data has received a great deal of attention. Mining useful information and helpful knowledge from these large databases has thus evolved into an important research area. In section 2 we provide a brief introduction to Data Warehousing. In section 3 KDD is discussed and section 3.1 provides discussion about the KDD process. In section 4 Data Mining is introduced and in section 4.1 various Data Mining Techniques have been given. The various issues in Data Mining are discussed in section 5 and finally the conclusion is given in section 6. 2. A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO DATA WAREHOUSING

The data warehouse is an informational environment that provides an integrated and total view of the enterprise. It makes the enterprises current and historical information easily available for decision making and makes decisionsupport transactions possible without hindering operational systems. The data warehouse is an information delivery system. The term Data Warehouse (DW) was first used by Barry Devlin [1], but Bill Inmon has won the most acclaim for introducing the concept, defined as follows- A Data Warehouse is a subject oriented, integrated, non-volatile and time-variant collection of data in support of managements decisions [2]. Let us have a closer look at these interesting properties. Subject oriented: The data are logically organized around major subjects of the organization, e.g., around customers, sales, or items produced. Integrated: All of the data about the subject are combined and can be analyzed together. Time variant: Historical data are maintained in detail form.

1.

INTRODUCTION

Recently, our capabilities of both generating and collecting data have been increasing rapidly. Millions of databases have been used in business management, government administration, scientific and engineering data management, and many other applications. It is noted that the number of such databases keeps growing rapidly because of the availability of powerful and accordable database systems. Consequently, data mining has become a research area with increasing importance. The information and knowledge gained can be used for applications ranging from market analysis, fraud detection, and customer retention, to production control and science exploration. The rapid development of computer technology, especially increased capacities and decreased costs of storage media, has led businesses to store huge amounts of external and internal information in large databases at low cost. Mining useful

Nonvolatile: The data are read only, not updated or changed by users. 3. KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY IN DATABASES (KDD)

Third is data cleaning and preprocessing. Basic operations include removing noise if appropriate, collecting the necessary information to model or account for noise, deciding on strategies for handling missing data fields, and accounting for time-sequence information and known changes. Fourth is data reduction and projection: finding useful features to represent the data depending on the goal of the task. With dimensionality reduction or transformation methods, the effective number of variables under consideration can be reduced, or invariant representations for the data can be found. Fifth is matching the goals of the KDD process (step 1) to a particular data-mining method. For example, summarization, classification, regression, clustering, and so on, are described later as well as in Fayyad, Piatetsky- Shapiro, and Smyth (1996). Sixth is exploratory analysis and model and hypothesis selection: choosing the data mining algorithm(s) and selecting method(s) to be used for searching for data patterns. This process includes deciding which models and parameters might be appropriate (for example, models of categorical data are different than models of vectors over the reals) and matching a particular datamining method with the overall criteria of the KDD process (for example, the end user might be more interested in understanding the model than its predictive capabilities). Seventh is data mining: searching for patterns of interest in a particular representational form or a set of such representations, including classification rules or trees, regression, and clustering. The user can significantly aid the data-mining method by correctly performing the preceding steps. Eighth is interpreting mined patterns, possibly returning to any of steps 1 through 7 for further iteration. This step can also involve visualization of the extracted patterns and models or visualization of the data given the extracted models. Ninth is acting on the discovered knowledge: using the knowledge directly, incorporating the knowledge into another system for further action, or simply documenting it and reporting it to interested parties. This process also includes checking for and resolving potential conflicts with previously believed (or extracted) knowledge.

KDD is the nontrivial process of identifying valid, novel, potentially useful, and ultimately understandable patterns in data [3]. By nontrivial, we mean that some search or inference is involved; that is, it is not a straightforward computation of predefined quantities like computing the average value of a set of numbers. The discovered patterns should be valid on new data with some degree of certainty. We also want patterns to be novel (at least to the system and preferably to the user) and potentially useful, that is, lead to some benefit to the user or task. Finally, the patterns should be understandable, if not immediately then after some post processing. An important notion, called interestingness (for example, see [4] and [5], is usually taken as an overall measure of pattern value, combining validity, novelty, usefulness, and simplicity. Interestingness functions can be defined explicitly or can be manifested implicitly through an ordering placed by the KDD system on the discovered patterns or models. Given these notions, we can consider a pattern to be knowledge if it exceeds some interestingness threshold, which is by no means an attempt to define knowledge in the philosophical or even the popular view. As a matter of fact, knowledge in this definition is purely user oriented and domain specific and is determined by whatever functions and thresholds the user chooses. Data mining is a step in the KDD process that consists of applying data analysis and discovery algorithms that, under acceptable computational efficiency limitations, produce a particular enumeration of patterns (or models) over the data. 3.1 The KDD Process The KDD process is interactive and iterative, involving numerous steps with many decisions made by the user. A practical view of the KDD process is given in [6] that emphasize the interactive nature of the process. Here, we broadly outline some of its basic steps: First is developing an understanding of the application domain and the relevant prior knowledge and identifying the goal of the KDD process from the customers viewpoint. Second is creating a target data set: selecting a data set, or focusing on a subset of variables or data samples, on which discovery is to be performed.

The KDD process can involve significant iteration and can contain loops between any two steps. The basic flow of

steps (although not the potential multitude of iterations and loops) is illustrated in figure 1. Most previous work on KDD has focused on step 7, the data mining. However, the other steps are as important (and probably more so) for the successful application of KDD in practice.

topic in database systems and machine learning and by many industrial companies as an important area with an opportunity of major revenues. The discovered knowledge can be applied to information management, query processing, decision making, process control, and many other applications. Researchers in many different fields, including database systems, knowledge-base systems, artificial intelligence, machine learning, knowledge acquisition, statistics, spatial databases, and data visualization, have shown great interest in data mining. Furthermore, several emerging applications in information providing services, such as on-line services and World Wide Web, also call for various data mining techniques to better understand user behavior, to meliorate the service provided, and to increase the business opportunities. 4.1 An Overview of Data Mining Techniques Since data mining poses many challenging research issues, direct applications of methods and techniques developed in related studies in machine learning, statistics, and database systems cannot solve these problems. It is necessary to perform dedicated studies to invent new data mining methods or develop integrated techniques for efficient and effective data mining. In this sense, data mining itself has formed an independent new field. The kinds of patterns that can be discovered depend upon the data mining tasks employed. By and large, there are two types of data mining tasks: descriptive data mining tasks that describe the general properties of the existing data, and predictive data mining tasks that attempt to do predictions based on inference on available data. The data mining functionalities and the variety of knowledge they discover are briefly presented in the following list: Characterization: Data characterization is a summarization of general features of objects in a target class, and produces what is called characteristic rules. For example, one may want to characterize the Our Video Store customers who regularly rent more than 30 movies a year. With concept hierarchies on the attributes describing the target class, the attribute oriented induction method can be used, for example, to carry out data summarization. Discrimination: Data discrimination produces what are called discriminant rules and is basically the comparison of the general features of objects between two classes referred to as the target class and the contrasting class. For example, one may want to compare the general characteristics of the customers who rented more than 30 movies in the last year with those whose rental account is lower than 5. The techniques used for data discrimination are very similar to the techniques used for data characterization with the

Figure 1. An Overview of the Steps That Compose the KDD Process [3]. 4. DATA MINING (DM)

Data mining is the process of discovering meaningful new correlations, patterns and trends by sifting through large amounts of data stored in repositories, using pattern recognition technologies as well as statistical and mathematical techniques. There are other definitions: Data mining is the analysis of (often large) observational data sets to find unsuspected relationships and to summarize the data in novel ways that are both understandable and useful to the data owner [7]. Data mining is an interdisciplinary field bringing together techniques from machine learning, pattern recognition, statistics, databases, and visualization to address the issue of information extraction from large data bases [8].

Data mining, which is also referred to as knowledge discovery in databases, means a process of nontrivial extraction of implicit, previously unknown and potentially useful information (such as knowledge rules, constraints, regularities) from data in databases [9]. There are also many other terms, appearing in some articles and documents, carrying a similar or slightly different meaning, such as knowledge mining from databases, knowledge extraction, data archaeology, data dredging, data analysis, and so on. Mining information and knowledge from large databases has been recognized by many researchers as a key research

exception that data discrimination results include comparative measures. Association analysis: Association analysis is the discovery of what are commonly called association rules. It studies the frequency of items occurring together in transactional databases, and based on a threshold called support, identifies the frequent item sets. Another threshold, confidence, which is the conditional probability than an item appears in a transaction when another item appears, is used to pinpoint association rules. Association analysis is commonly used for market basket analysis. For example, it could be useful for the Our Video Store manager to know what movies are often rented together or if there is a relationship between renting a certain type of movies and buying popcorn or pop. The discovered association rules are of the form: P^Q [s,c], where P and Q are conjunctions of attribute value-pairs, and s (for support) is the probability that P and Q appear together in a transaction and c (for confidence) is the conditional probability that Q appears in a transaction when P is present. For example, the hypothetic association rule: RentType(X, game) ^ Age(X, 13Buys(X, pop) [s=2%, c=55%] 19)

class label for some data. The latter is tied to classification. Once a classification model is built based on a training set, the class label of an object can be foreseen based on the attribute values of the object and the attribute values of the classes. Prediction is however more often referred to the forecast of missing numerical values, or increase/ decrease trends in time related data. The major idea is to use a large number of past values to consider probable future values. Clustering: Similar to classification, clustering is the organization of data in classes. However, unlike classification, in clustering, class labels are unknown and it is up to the clustering algorithm to discover acceptable classes. Clustering is also called unsupervised classification, because the classification is not dictated by given class labels. There are many clustering approaches all based on the principle of maximizing the similarity between objects in a same class (intra-class similarity) and minimizing the similarity between objects of different classes (interclass similarity). Outlier analysis: Outliers are data elements that cannot be grouped in a given class or cluster. Also known as exceptions or surprises, they are often very important to identify. While outliers can be considered noise and discarded in some applications, they can reveal important knowledge in other domains, and thus can be very significant and their analysis valuable. Evolution and deviation analysis: Evolution and deviation analysis pertain to the study of time related data that changes in time. Evolution analysis models evolutionary trends in data, which consent to characterizing, comparing, classifying or clustering of time related data. Deviation analysis, on the other hand, considers differences between measured values and expected values, and attempts to find the cause of the deviations from the anticipated values. 5. THE ISSUES IN DATA MINING

would indicate that 2% of the transactions considered are of customers aged between 13 and 19 who are renting a game and buying a pop, and that there is a certainty of 55% that teenage customers who rent a game also buy pop. Classification: Classification analysis is the organization of data in given classes. Also known as supervised classification, the classification uses given class labels to order the objects in the data collection. Classification approaches normally use a training set where all objects are already associated with known class labels. The classification algorithm learns from the training set and builds a model. The model is used to classify new objects. For example, after starting a credit policy, the Our Video Store managers could analyze the customers behaviors vis--vis their credit, and label accordingly the customers who received credits with three possible labels safe, risky and very risky. The classification analysis would generate a model that could be used to either accept or reject credit requests in the future. Prediction: Prediction has attracted considerable attention given the potential implications of successful forecasting in a business context. There are two major types of predictions: one can either try to predict some unavailable data values or pending trends, or predict a

While data mining is still in its infancy, it is becoming a trend and ubiquitous. Before data mining develops into a conventional, mature and trusted discipline, many still pending issues have to be addressed. Some of these issues are addressed below: Security and social issues: Security is an important issue with any data collection that is shared and/or is intended to be used for strategic decision-making. In addition, when data is collected for customer profiling, user behavior understanding, correlating personal data with other information, etc., large amounts of sensitive and private information about individuals or companies

is gathered and stored. This becomes controversial given the confidential nature of some of this data and the potential illegal access to the information. Moreover, data mining could disclose new implicit knowledge about individuals or groups that could be against privacy policies, especially if there is potential dissemination of discovered information. Another issue that arises from this concern is the appropriate use of data mining. Due to the value of data, databases of all sorts of content are regularly sold, and because of the competitive advantage that can be attained from implicit knowledge discovered, some important information could be withheld, while other information could be widely distributed and used without control. User interface issues: Good data visualization eases the interpretation of data mining results, as well as helps users better understand their needs. Many data exploratory analysis tasks are significantly facilitated by the ability to see data in an appropriate visual presentation. There are many visualization ideas and proposals for effective data graphical presentation. The major issues related to user interfaces and visualization are screen real-estate, information rendering, and interaction. Interactivity with the data and data mining results is crucial since it provides means for the user to focus and refine the mining tasks, as well as to picture the discovered knowledge from different angles and at different conceptual levels. Mining methodology issues: These issues pertain to the data mining approaches applied and their limitations. Topics such as versatility of the mining approaches, the diversity of data available, the dimensionality of the domain, the broad analysis needs, the assessment of the knowledge discovered, the exploitation of background knowledge and metadata, the control and handling of noise in data, etc. are all examples that can dictate mining methodology choices. For instance, it is often desirable to have different data mining methods available since different approaches may perform differently depending upon the data at hand. Performance issues: Many artificial intelligence and statistical methods exist for data analysis and interpretation. However, these methods were often not designed for the very large data sets data mining is dealing with today. Terabyte sizes are common. This raises the issues of scalability and efficiency of the data mining methods when processing considerably large data. Algorithms with exponential and even mediumorder polynomial complexity cannot be of practical use for data mining. Linear algorithms are usually the norm. In same theme, sampling can be used for mining instead of the whole dataset. However, concerns such as

completeness and choice of samples may arise. Other topics in the issue of performance are incremental updating, and parallel programming. Data source issues: There are many issues related to the data sources, some are practical such as the diversity of data types, while others are philosophical like the data glut problem. We certainly have an excess of data since we already have more data than we can handle and we are still collecting data at an even higher rate. If the spread of database management systems has helped increase the gathering of information, the advent of data mining is certainly encouraging more data harvesting. The current practice is to collect as much data as possible now and process it, or try to process it, later. Regarding the practical issues related to data sources, there is the subject of heterogeneous databases and the focus on diverse complex data types. We are storing different types of data in a variety of repositories. It is difficult to expect a data mining system to effectively and efficiently achieve good mining results on all kinds of data and sources. Different kinds of data and sources may require distinct algorithms and methodologies. Currently, there is a focus on relational databases and data warehouses, but other approaches need to be pioneered for other specific complex data types. A versatile data mining tool, for all sorts of data, may not be realistic. 6. CONCLUSION

In this paper we briefly reviewed the Data Warehouse, Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD), KDD Process, Data Mining and issues related to Data Mining. This review would be helpful to researchers to focus on the various issues of data mining. In future course, we will review the various classification algorithms and significance of evolutionary computing (genetic programming) approach in designing of efficient classification algorithms for data mining. 7. REFERENCES

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