Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
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F IGURE 13.13
A 'slice' of the hospital patient tracking
and billing system data
Data mining is the searching out of hidden knowledge in a company's data
that can give the company a competitive advantage in its marketplace. This would
be impossible for people to do manually because they would immediately be
overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data in the company's data warehouse. It
must be done by software. In fact, very sophisticated data mining software has been
developed that uses several advanced statistical and artificial intelligence techniques
such as:
Case-based learning
■
Decision trees
■
Neural networks
■
Genetic algorithms
■
Describing these techniques is beyond the scope of this topic. But it's worth taking
a quick look at a couple of the possibilities from an application or user's point of
view.
One type of data mining application is known as ''
market basket analysis
.''
For example, consider the data collected by a supermarket as it checks out its
customers by scanning the bar codes on the products they're purchasing. The
company might have software study the collected ''market baskets,'' each of which
is literally the goods that a particular customer bought in one trip to the store.
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