12/19/2020 What’s the relationship between machine learning and data mining?

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Xavier Amatriain

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What’s the relationship between machine

learning and data mining?
Xavier Amatriain Jan 14, 2016 · 2 min read

This is not an easy question because there is no common agreement on what “Data
Mining” means. But, I am going to say that I disagree with the answer from Wikipedia
that Yuvraj Singla points to. I don’t think saying that machine learning focuses on
prediction is accurate at all although I mostly agree with the definition of Data Mining
focusing on the discovery of properties on the data.

So, let’s start with that: Data Mining is a cross-disciplinary field that focuses on
discovering properties of data sets. (Forget about it being the analysis step of
“knowledge discovery in databases” KDD, this was maybe true years ago, it is not
anymore).

There are different approaches to discovering properties of data sets. Machine Learning
is one of them. Another one is simply looking at the data sets using visualization
techniques or Topological Data Analysis

On the other hand Machine Learning is a sub-field of data science that focuses on
designing algorithms that can learn from and make predictions on the data. Machine
learning includes Supervised Learning and Unsupervised Learning methods.

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12/19/2020 What’s the relationship between machine learning and data mining? | by Xavier Amatriain | Medium

Unsupervised methods actually start off from unlabeled data sets, so, in a way, they are
directly related to finding out unknown properties in them (e.g. clusters or rules).

It is clear then that machine learning can be used for data mining. However, data
mining can use other techniques besides or on top of machine learning.

Btw, to make things even more complicated, now we have a new term, Data Science,
that is competing for attention, especially with Data Mining and KDD. Even the SIGKDD
group at ACM is slowly moving towards using Data Science. In their website, they now
describe themselves as “The community for data mining, data science and analytics[1]”.
My bet is that KDD will disappear as a term pretty soon and data mining will simply
merge into data science.

[1] About SIGKDD

Originally published at www.quora.com.

Machine Learning Data Science

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