OLAM and Data Mining:

Concepts and Techniques

 Introduction
• Data explosion problem:
– Automated data collection tools and mature database
technology lead to tremendous amounts of data stored
in databases, data warehouses and other information
repositories
• We are drowning in data, but starving for
knowledge!
• Data warehousing and data mining:
– On-line analytical processing – query-driven data
analysis
– The efficient discovery of interesting knowledge (rules,
regularities, patterns, constraints) from data in large
databases
 Evolution of Database Technology
• 1960s:
– Data collection, database creation, IMS and network
DBMS
• 1970s:
– Relational data model, relational DBMS
• 1980s:
– RDBMS, advanced data models (extended-relational,
OO, deductive, etc.) and application-oriented DBMS
(spatial, scientific, engineering, etc.)
• 1990s:
– Data mining and data warehousing, multimedia
databases, and Web technology
 What is data mining?

• Data mining: the process of efficient discovery of

previously unknown patterns, relationships, rules
in large databases and data warehouses
• Goal: help the human analyst to understand the
data
• SQL query:
– How many bottles of wine did we sell in 1st Qtr of 1999
in Poland vs Austria?
 What is data mining?

• Data mining query:

– How do the buyers of wine in Poland and Austria
differ?
– What else do the buyers of wine in Austria buy along
with wine?
– How the buyers of wine can be characterized?
 What is data mining?
• Data mining (knowledge discovery in databases):
– Extraction of interesting ( non-trivial, implicit,
previously unknown and potentially useful)
information from data in large databases
• Alternative names and their “inside stories”:
– Knowledge discovery in databases (KDD: SIGKDD),
knowledge extraction, data archeology, data dredging,
information harvesting, business intelligence, etc.
– Data mining: a misnomer?
• What is not data mining?
– Expert systems or small statistical programs
– OLAP
 Data Mining: A KDD Process
• Steps of a KDD Process:
– Learning the application domain:
• relevant prior knowledge and goals of application
– Creating a target data set: data selection
– Data cleaning and preprocessing: (may take 60% of effort!)
– Data reduction and projection:
– Find useful features, dimensionality/variable reduction, invariant
representation.
– Choosing functions of data mining
• summarization, classification, regression, association, clustering.
– Choosing the mining algorithm(s)
– Data mining: search for patterns of interest
– Interpretation: analysis of results.
• visualization, transformation, removing redundant patterns, etc.
– Use of discovered knowledge
Data Mining and Business Intelligence

Increasing potential
to support
business decisions End User
Making
Decisions

Data Presentation Business

Visualization Analyst
Data Mining
Information Discovery
Data
Data Exploration
Analyst
Statistical Analysis, Reporting
Data Warehouses/Data Marts
DBA
OLAP, MDA

Data Sources
Paper, Files, Database systems, OLTP, WWW
 Mining query Mining result

User GUI API

OLAM OLAP
Engine Engine
Data Cube API

MDDB
Meta
Data
Filtering&Integration Database API Filtering

Data cleaning Data

Databases Data integration Warehouse

An OLAM Architecture
 Data Mining: Confluence of Multiple
Disciplines
• Database systems, data warehouse and OLAP
• Statistics
• Machine learning
• Visualization
• Information science
• High performance computing
• Other disciplines:
– Neural networks, mathematical modeling, information
retrieval, pattern recognition, etc.
Data Mining: On What Kind of Data?
• Relational databases
• Data warehouses
• Transactional databases
• Advanced DB systems and information
repositories
– Object-oriented and object-relational databases
– Spatial databases
– Time-series data and temporal data
– Text databases and multimedia databases
– Heterogeneous and legacy databases
– WWW
 Data Mining Functionality
Data mining methods may be classified onto 6
basic classes:
• Associations
– Finding rules like “if the customer buys mustard,
sausage, and beer, then the probability that he/she buys
chips is 50%”
• Classifications
– Classify data based on the values of the decision
attribute, e.g. classify patients based on their “state”
• Clustering
– Group data to form new classes, cluster customers
based on their behavior to find common patterns
 Data Mining Functionality
• Sequential patterns
– Finding rules like “if the customer buys TV, then, few
days later, he/she buys camera, then the probability that
he/she will buy within 1 month video is 50%”
• Time-Series similarities
– Finding similar sequences (or subsequences) in time-
series (e.g. stock analysis)
• Outlier detection
– Finding anomalies/exceptions/deviations in data