Data Mining Algorithms are a practical and technically-oriented guide to data mining algorithms that covers the most essential algorithms for building classification, regression, and clustering models, as well as techniques used for attribute selection and transformation, model quality evaluation, and building model ensembles.

Data mining is the exploration and analysis of big data to discover meaningful patterns and rules. It is considered a discipline under the data science field of study and differs from predictive analytics because it describes historical data, while data mining aims to predict future outcomes. Additionally, data mining techniques are used to develop machine learning (ML) models that power modern artificial intelligence (AI) applications such as search engine algorithms and recommendation systems.

Benefits of Data Mining

  • Automated Decision-Making

Data Mining lets organizations to continually analyze data and automate both routine and serious decisions without the delay of human judgment. Banks can instantly detect fraudulent transactions, request verification, and even secure personal information to protect their customers against identity theft. Deployed within operational algorithms of the firm, these models can collect, analyze, and act on data independently to streamline decision making and enhance the daily processes of an organization.

  • Accurate Prediction and Forecasting

Planning is a critical process within every organization. Data mining facilitates planning and offers managers with reliable forecasts based on past trends and current conditions. Macy’s implements demand forecasting models to predict the demand for every clothing category at every store and route the appropriate inventory to efficiently meet the market’s needs.

  • Cost Reduction

Data mining offers more efficient use and allocation of resources. Organizations can plan and make automated decisions with accurate forecasts that will result in maximum cost reduction. Delta embedded RFID chips in passengers checked baggage and deployed data mining models to identify holes in their process and reduce the number of bags mishandled. This process improvement maximizes passenger satisfaction and decreases the cost of searching for and re-routing lost baggage.

  • Customer Insights

Firms deploy data mining models from data of the customers to uncover key characteristics and differences among their customers. Data mining can be used to create personas and personalize each touchpoint to enhance the overall customer experience. In the year 2017, Disney invested over one billion dollars to create and implement “Magic Bands.” These bands have a symbiotic relationship with consumers, working to increase their overall experience at the resort while simultaneously collecting data on their activities for Disney to analyze to further improve their customer experience.

Following are some of the best Data Mining Algorithms –

C4.5 Algorithm

C4.5 is one of the best data mining algorithms and was developed by Ross Quinlan. C4.5 is used to generate a classifier in the form of a decision tree from a set of data that has already been classified. Classifier here refers to a data mining tool that takes data that we need to classify and tries to predict the class of new data.

Every data point will have its attributes. The decision tree created by C4.5 poses a question about the value of an attribute and depending on those values, the new data gets classified. The training dataset is labelled with lasses making C4.5 a supervised learning algorithm. Decision trees are always easy to interpret and explain making C4.5 fast and popular compared to other data mining algorithms.

K-Means Algorithm

This is one of the most used clustering algorithms based on a partitional strategy. K-means is an algorithm that minimizes the squared error of values from their respective cluster means. In this way, K-means implements hard clustering, where every item is assigned to only one cluster (Kaufman and Rousseeeuw, 1990). On the contrary, EM is a soft clustering approach because it returns the probability that an item belongs to each cluster. Thus Expectation-Maximization (EM) can be seen as a generalization of K-means obtained by modelling the data as a mixture of normal distributions and finding the cluster parameters (the mean and covariance matrix) by increasing the likelihood of data.

The K-means algorithm is an iterative clustering algorithm to partition a given dataset into a user-specified number of clusters, k. The algorithm has been proposed by some researchers such as Lloyd (1957, 1982), Friedman and Rubin (1967), and McQueen (1967).

Support Vector Machine ( SVM )

Support Vector Machine or SVM is one of the most well-known Supervised Learning algorithms, which is used for Classification as well as Regression problems. However, it is mainly used for Classification problems in Machine Learning.

The goal of the Support Vector Machine algorithm is to create the best line or decision boundary that can segregate n-dimensional space into classes so that we can easily put the new data point in the correct category shortly. This best decision boundary is called a hyperplane.

Support Vector Machine chooses the extreme points/vectors that help in creating the hyperplane. These extreme cases are known as support vectors, and hence the algorithm is called Support Vector Machine.

Apriori

The Apriori algorithm is used for mining frequent itemsets and devising association rules from a transactional database. The parameters “support” and “confidence” are used. Support refers to items’ frequency of occurrence; confidence is a conditional probability.

Items in a transaction form an item set. The algorithm begins by identifying frequent, individual items (items with a frequency greater than or equal to the given support) in the database and continues to extend them to larger, frequent itemsets​.

Expectation-Maximization (EM)

The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is a way to find maximum-likelihood estimates for model parameters when the data is incomplete, or has missing data points, or has unobserved/hidden latent variables. This is an iterative way to approximate the maximum likelihood function. While maximum likelihood estimation can find the “best fit” model for a set of data, it does not work specifically well for incomplete data sets. The more complex Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm can find model parameters even if you have missing data. It works by selecting random values for the missing data points and using those guesses to estimate a second set of data. The new values are used to create a better guess for the first set, and the process continues until the algorithm converges on a fixed point.

PageRank

PageRank is commonly used by search engines like Google. It is a link analysis algorithm that determines the relative importance of an object linked within a network of objects. Link analysis is a type of network analysis that explores the associations among objects. Google search uses this algorithm by understanding the backlinks between web pages.

It is one of the methods Google uses to determine the relative importance of a webpage and rank it higher on the google search engine. The PageRank trademark is proprietary of Google and the PageRank algorithm is patented by Stanford University. PageRank is treated as an unsupervised learning approach as it determines the relative importance just by considering the links and doesn’t require any other inputs.

AdaBoost

The AdaBoost algorithm, short for Adaptive Boosting, is a Boosting technique that is used as an Ensemble Method in Machine Learning. This algorithm is called Adaptive Boosting as the weights are re-assigned to each instance, with higher weights to incorrectly classified instances.

Boosting is used to reduce bias as well as the variance for supervised learning. It works on the principle where learners are grown sequentially. Except for the first, each subsequent learner is grown from previously grown learners. In simple words, weak learners are converted into strong ones. Adaboost algorithm also works on the same principle as boosting, but there is a slight difference in working. Let’s discuss the difference in detail.

k-nearest neighbours algorithm (k-NN)

The k-nearest neighbour algorithm (k-NN)  is a robust and versatile classifier that is often used as a benchmark for more complex classifiers like Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and Support Vector Machines (SVM). Despite its simplicity, the k-nearest neighbour algorithm (k-NN)can outperform more powerful classifiers and is used in a variety of applications such as economic forecasting, data compression, and genetics. For example, the k-nearest neighbour algorithm (k-NN)  was leveraged in a 2006 study of functional genomics for the assignment of genes based on their expression profiles.

Naive Bayes Algorithm

The Naive Bayes Classifier technique is based upon the Bayesian theorem. It is particularly used when the dimensionality of the inputs is high. The Bayesian Classifier is capable of calculating the possible output. That is based on the input. It is also possible to include new raw data at runtime and have a better probabilistic classifier.

This classifier considers the presence of a particular characteristic of a class. That is unrelated to the presence of any other characters when the class variable is provided.

For example, a fruit may consider being an apple if it is red, round.

Even if these characteristics depend on each other characteristics of a class. A naive Bayes classifier considers all these properties to contribute to the probability. That it shows this fruit is an apple. The algorithm works as follows,

The theorem of Bayes provides a way of calculating the posterior probability, P(c|x), from P(c), P(x), and P(x|c). Naive Bayes classifier considers the effect of the value of a predictor (x) on a provided class (c). That is independent of the values of other predictors.

P(c|x) is called the posterior probability of class (target) given predictor (attribute) of class.

P(c) is called the prior probability of class.

P(x|c) is the likelihood which is the probability of predictor of provided class.

P(x) is the prior probability of predictor of class.

CART Algorithm

CART stands for classification and regression trees. It is a decision tree learning algorithm that gives either regression or classification trees as an output. In CART, the decision tree nodes will have precisely 2 branches. Just like C4.5, CART is also a classifier. The regression or classification tree model is constructed by using a labelled training dataset provided by the user. Hence it is treated as a supervised learning technique.

ID3 Algorithm

Data Mining Algorithms starts with the original set as the root hub. On every cycle, it emphasizes every unused attribute of the set and figures. That the entropy of attribute. At that point chooses the attribute. That has the smallest entropy value.

The set is S then split by the selected attribute to produce subsets of the information.

ANN

The Artificial Neural Network (ANN) bases its assimilation of data on the way that the human brain processes information. The brain has billions of cells called neurons that process information in the form of electric signals. External information, or stimuli, is received, after which the brain processes it, and then produces a result (output).

Similarly, ANN receives input through a large number of processors that operate in parallel and are arranged in tiers. The first tier receives the raw input data, which it then processes through nodes that are interconnected and have their packages of knowledge and rules.

The processor then passes it on to the next tier as result (output). Every successive tier of processors and nodes receives the result (output) from the tier preceding it and further processes it; rather than having to process the raw data anew every time.

Neural networks modify themselves as they learn from their robust initial training and then from ongoing self-learning that they experience by processing additional information. A simple learning model applied by neural networks is the process of weighting input streams in favour of those most likely to be correct and accurate.

This means a preference is put on the input streams that have a higher weight; and the higher the weight, the more influence that unit has on another. The process of decreasing predictable errors through weight is done through gradient descent algorithms. Finally, result (output) units are the end part of the process; this is where the network responds to the data that was put in initially and can now be processed.

48 Decision Trees

A decision tree is a predictive machine-learning model. That decides the target value of a new sample. That based on various attribute values of the available data. The internal nodes of a decision tree denote the various attributes. Also, the branches b/w the nodes tell us the possible values. That these attributes can have in the observed samples. While the terminal nodes tell us the final value of the dependent variable.

The attribute is to predict is known as the dependent variable. Since its value depends upon, the values of all the other attributes. The other attributes, which help in predicting the value of the dependent variables, that are the independent variables in the dataset.