Data Mining - Types and Tasks of the Process

Data mining refers to the process of extracting crucial lumps of data from the internet and analyzing it further to discover meaningful new patterns, trends and relationships within them. The process involves scanning through large amounts of data from online and offline sources and using patter recognition technologies and statistical and mathematical techniques to analyze and process it. Large scrapes of observational data are mined and relationships are recognized and further summarized accordingly.

Being an iterative process, progress within data mining is often defined by discovery of crucial information through either automated or manual processes. Data mining services are especially useful in areas of research where there are no standards or predetermined parameters to conform to. In such cases, data mining processes bring out interesting and unique results. It searches for new and valuable information from large volumes of data. For the best results, it is important that the mining process be a healthy balance of human knowledge and computer search capabilities.

Data mining has two prime goals – Prediction and Description
Prediction process usually using some variables and fields in data sets in order to predict and unknown values of other relevant variables. Moreover, the Description process aims to find patterns and trends in the data that can make it much more understandable by humans. Going by this, data mining activities can be further categorized in to two groups:

• Predictive Data Mining
• Descriptive Data Mining

Predictive data mining involves creation of model system based on and described by a given set of data.

Descriptive data mining on the other hand produces new and unique information inferred from the available set of data.

While predictive data mining follows the basis of classification, prediction, estimation and so on, descriptive data mining is more about understanding and analyzing relationships and patterns within a given set of data.

Data Mining Tasks
Though the approaches are different, both predictive and descriptive data mining tasks are:

• Classification – All the information at hand is scanned, analyzed and classified into several predefined classes.
• Regression – Within the processed information is then analyzed further to identify any visible patterns and trends.
• Clustering – It is a descriptive task wherein a finite set of groups and clusters are identified to describe the data.
• Summarization – Various methods are formulated to describe the set of data and information.
• Dependency Modeling – A local model is identified that describes the important dependencies between variables and data sets.
• Deviation Detection – The important and significant changes in the data set are recorded.

Data mining is a fast growing realm of services. as business owners wake up to realize the benefits of hiring data mining services, more and more projects are outsourced to developing countries like India that provide efficient services and very cheap rates. Increased quality at lower prices makes for an efficient business decision. Data mining services can be used to strengthen marketing campaigns, make them more effective and further improve their outcomes by making business processes more customer centric and more focused.

Maneet Puri is the managing head of LeXolution IT Services, a top notch offshore outsourcing firm that caters to its clients with efficient and effective KPO services like data mining, data conversion and other data processing and management services.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com

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