Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
Many DM software tools have been developed in the last few years due to the
popularization of DM. Although a lot of them are commercially distributed (some
of the leading commercial software are mining suites such as SPSS Clementine,
1
Oracle Data Mining
2
and KnowledgeSTUDIO
3
), only a few were available as open
source. Fortunately this tendency has changed and free and open source DM tools
have appeared to cover many specialized tasks in the process as well as general tools
that include most of the steps of KDD. Among the latter we can highlight Weka
[
2
], Orange [
3
]orJava-ML[
4
] as the most well-known of a growing family of open
source toolboxes for DM.
Most programming languages have a DM software so any user has the possibility
of performing experiments. While Weka, RapidMiner
4
[
5
], Java-ML and
r
are written in Java, ADaM
5
and Orange are written in Python. Statistical languages
also have their software tools as Rattle [
6
]forR.
It is also common to find libraries for some popular programming languages that
can be added to a particular project. Their aim is not the novel user but an experienced
practitioner who wants to add functionality to real-world cases without dealing with a
multi-purpose GUI or having to rip off the methods they want. A well-known library
written in C++ for fast programs is MLC++,
6
and R has their own statistical analysis
package.
7
In Java the MLJ library
8
is available to be integrated in any project with
ease.
Apart from the aforementioned toolboxes, the reader can find more alternatives
to suit to their needs. Many specialized webpages are devoted to the presentation,
promotion and publishing of DM news and software. We recommend visiting the
KDnuggets software directory
9
and the-Data-Mine site.
10
In the research field open
source tools are playing an increasingly important role as is pointed out in [
7
]. To this
regard the link page of the Knowledge Extraction based on Evolutionary Learning
(KEEL) webpage
11
contains an extensive list of open source DM tools and related
fields such as metaheuristic optimization.
KEEL [
8
] is a open source Java software tool which empowers the user to assess
the behavior of ML, evolutionary learning and soft computing based techniques for
different kinds of DMproblems: regression, classification, clustering, pattern mining
and so on. This tool can offer several advantages:
α
Mi
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