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Data Mining Tasks

Data mining tasks are generally divided into

Predictive tasks

to predict the value of a particular attribute based on the values of other attributes.

Attribute to be predicted - target or dependent variables.

Attributes used for making the prediction -  explanatory or independent variables

Descriptive tasks

to derive patterns (correlations, trends, clusters, trajectories, and anomalies) that summarize the underlying relationships in data.

It is exploratory in nature

It requires postprocessing techniques to validate and explain the results

Core data mining tasks

Predictive Modeling

Association Analysis

Cluster Analysis

Anomaly Detection


Predictive Modeling

task of building a model for the target variable as a function of the explanatory variables.

Two types of predictive tasks

Regression

used for continuous target variables

Classification

used for discrete/categorical target variables

Example:

Predicting disease of a patient

Association Analysis

used to discover patterns that describe strongly associated features in the data.

Example

Identifying products bought together

Cluster Analysis

used to identify groups of closely related observations

Example

Grouping articles to the related topics

Anomaly Detection

task of identifying observations whose characteristics are significantly different from the rest of the data.

A good anomaly detector must have a high detection rate and a low false alarm rate.

Example

Detecting credit card fraud

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