Temporal Association Data Mining



Temporal Association Data Mining

Introduction

Data mining is the process of analyzing or manipulating the data from different angles and perspectives (Data Mining: What is Data Mining?, reviewed on 16 March 2009, http://www. anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/jason.frand/teacher/technologies/palace/datamining.htm). By analyzing the data we obtain some useful information that can then be categorized and used to predict future patterns. Consumer focused companies use data mining to determine the impact of the internal or external factors of products on the sales and the profits.

Discussion

Data mining gives a company useful information that can be used to predict the patterns of sales, based on the past purchase patterns of the customers and also helps plan the future promotional activities. So it can be said that major goal of the data mining is prediction of business pattern.

For example, a shop keeper collects data on purchase pattern of some customers based on features like, the age and gender of the buyer, the frequency of purchase, the occasions of purchases. He can then utilize such personal knowledge for bringing in innovation in the promotional strategies to increase sales (a reflective practice, i.e. the outcome is changed by changing the reflex to the stimulus).

Data mining is being used for several decades by many companies which possessed a tacit knowledge of the process. Then it was known in the name of the knowledge management. The benefit those companies derived from such process was huge. When they started using the statistical methods, accuracy of such predictions increased. Relationships between certain inputs with that of certain outcomes were derived using statistical methods. The advent of computers followed by major software developments has helped the companies turn to electronic data mining. This has increased the speed and accuracy of the predictions further. Today, custom made softwares are available for analyzing the data collected by the companies. These soft wares also help the companies in warehousing the data.

Today, the data mining has become an important knowledge management (KM) model in the corporate structure and it plays a major role in the decision making process of the company leadership. For that purpose, most of the data mining processes use the basic statistical principle of Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA). And, data mining, to some extend, makes use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the data base research technologies in the processing of the information.

The data mining process

In earlier days, the whole process was done manually and ...