Home Forums General Discussion What is Data mining? Reply To: What is Data mining?

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Anonymous
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Data mining is the task of extracting some new (and previously unknown) piece of information from an existing dataset. This is performed using some Machine Learning technique. It can be quite interesting if you are into AI, as you can learn about a lot of those Machine Learning techniques, Neural Networks, Bayesian Networks, k-Nearest Neighbour, Decision Trees etc.

One famous example, is the idea that supermarkets could track the habits of customers (as a whole), by keeping track of what is bought at the check out. But they were unable to make much sense of this data set (since it is potentially huge). Having mined the data using some Machine Learning algorithm, they could see that; of the large number of people that would buy nappies, there was a large correlation to those that also bought beer. What this was, was fathers who would be picking up nappies at the shop, would also pick up beer too. With this information, some supermarkets then decided to start putting the baby-products aisle and the beer aisle quite close together "for convenience"