The increasing volume of data in modern business and science calls for more complex and sophisticated tools. Although advances in data mining technology have made extensive data collection much easier, it's still always evolving and there is a constant need for new techniques and tools that can help us transform this data into useful information and knowledge. Since the previous edition's publication, great advances have been made in the field of data mining. Not only does the third of edition of Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques continue the tradition of equipping you with an understanding and application of the theory and practice of discovering patterns hidden in large data sets, it also focuses on new, important topics in the field: data warehouses and data cube technology, mining stream, mining social networks, and mining spatial, multimedia and other complex data. Each chapter is a stand-alone guide to a critical topic, presenting proven algorithms and sound implementations ready to be used directly or with strategic modification against live data. This is the resource you need if you want to apply today's most powerful data mining techniques to meet real business challenges. * Presents dozens of algorithms and implementation examples, all in pseudo-code and suitable for use in real-world, large-scale data mining projects. * Addresses advanced topics such as mining object-relational databases, spatial databases, multimedia databases, time-series databases, text databases, the World Wide Web, and applications in several fields. *Provides a comprehensive, practical look at the concepts and techniques you need to get the most out of real business data

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Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques offers a thorough grounding in machine learning concepts as well as practical advice on applying machine learning tools and techniques in real-world data mining situations. This highly anticipated third edition of the most acclaimed work on data mining and machine learning will teach you everything you need to know about preparing inputs, interpreting outputs, evaluating results, and the algorithmic methods at the heart of successful data mining. Thorough updates reflect the technical changes and modernizations that have taken place in the field since the last edition, including new material on Data Transformations, Ensemble Learning, Massive Data Sets, Multi-instance Learning, plus a new version of the popular Weka machine learning software developed by the authors. Witten, Frank, and Hall include both tried-and-true techniques of today as well as methods at the leading edge of contemporary research. *Provides a thorough grounding in machine learning concepts as well as practical advice on applying the tools and techniques to your data mining projects *Offers concrete tips and techniques for performance improvement that work by transforming the input or output in machine learning methods *Includes downloadable Weka software toolkit, a collection of machine learning algorithms for data mining tasks-in an updated, interactive interface. Algorithms in toolkit cover: data pre-processing, classification, regression, clustering, association rules, visualization

Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques

Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Machine learning

Probability Distributions.- Linear Models for Regression.- Linear Models for Classification.- Neural Networks.- Kernel Methods.- Sparse Kernel Machines.- Graphical Models.- Mixture Models and EM.- Approximate Inference.- Sampling Methods.- Continuous Latent Variables.- Sequential Data.- Combining Models.

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

https://ai.stanford.edu/~ronnyk/wrappersPrint.pdf

Wrappers for feature subset selection

Storing and using specific instances improves the performance of several supervised learning algorithms. These include algorithms that learn decision trees, classification rules, and distributed networks. However, no investigation has analyzed algorithms that use only specific instances to solve incremental learning tasks. In this paper, we describe a framework and methodology, called instance-based learning, that generates classification predictions using only specific instances. Instance-based learning algorithms do not maintain a set of abstractions derived from specific instances. This approach extends the nearest neighbor algorithm, which has large storage requirements. We describe how storage requirements can be significantly reduced with, at most, minor sacrifices in learning rate and classification accuracy. While the storage-reducing algorithm performs well on several real-world databases, its performance degrades rapidly with the level of attribute noise in training instances. Therefore, we extended it with a significance test to distinguish noisy instances. This extended algorithm's performance degrades gracefully with increasing noise levels and compares favorably with a noise-tolerant decision tree algorithm.

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Instance-Based Learning Algorithms

Many lazy learning algorithms are derivatives of the k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) classifier, which uses a distance function to generate predictions from stored instances. Several studies have shown that k-NN‘s performance is highly sensitive to the definition of its distance function. Many k-NN variants have been proposed to reduce this sensitivity by parameterizing the distance function with feature weights. However, these variants have not been categorized nor empirically compared. This paper reviews a class of weight-setting methods for lazy learning algorithms. We introduce a framework for distinguishing these methods and empirically compare them. We observed four trends from our experiments and conducted further studies to highlight them. Our results suggest that methods which use performance feedback to assign weight settings demonstrated three advantages over other methods: they require less pre-processing, perform better in the presence of interacting features, and generally require less training data to learn good settings. We also found that continuous weighting methods tend to outperform feature selection algorithms for tasks where some features are useful but less important than others.

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A review and empirical evaluation of feature weighting methods for a class of lazy learning algorithms

Several recent machine learning publications demonstrate the utility of using feature selection algorithms in supervised learning tasks. Among these, sequential feature selection algorithms are receiving attention. The most frequently studied variants of these algorithms are forward and backward sequential selection. Many studies on supervised learning with sequential feature selection report applications of these algorithms, but do not consider variants of them that might be more appropriate for some performance tasks. This paper reports positive empirical results on such variants, and argues for their serious consideration in similar learning tasks.

A Comparative Evaluation of Sequential Feature Selection Algorithms

Lazy learning

Incremental variants of the nearest neighbor algorithm are a potentially suitable choice for incremental learning tasks. They have fast learning rates, low updating costs, and have recorded comparatively high classification accuracies in several applications. Although the nearest neighbor algorithm suffers from high storage requirements, modifications exist that significantly reduce this problem. Unfortunately, its applicability is limited by several other serious problems. First, storage reduction variants of this algorithm are highly sensitive to noise. Second, these algorithms are sensitive to irrelevant attributes. Finally, the nearest neighbor algorithm assumes that all instances are described by the same set of attributes. This inflexibility causes problems when subsequently processed instances introduce novel attributes that are relevant to the learning task. In this paper, we present a comprehensive sequence of three incremental, edited nearest neighbor algorithms that tolerate attribute noise, determine relative attribute relevances, and accept instances described by novel attributes. We outline evidence indicating that these instance-based algorithms are robust incremental learners.

David W. Aha

Papers

Instance-Based Learning Algorithms

A review and empirical evaluation of feature weighting methods for a class of lazy learning algorithms

A Comparative Evaluation of Sequential Feature Selection Algorithms

Lazy learning

Tolerating noisy, irrelevant and novel attributes in instance-based learning algorithms