Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 1.
Phases of a data mining methodology
Defining the proposed phases of the methodology, the different stages of
RUP methodology have been taken into account. One of the main goals of
the proposed methodology is to establish the activities to be carried out as
well as their timing for its successful ending while preserving flexibility in the
process.
The proposed phases are briefly described below:
•
Project Conception establishes the main topics in the project. In order
to develop a proper project plan information about business goals, data
sources, risks and contingencies plans, costs and benefits, estimations and
schedules, resources and results need to be gathered. A complete project
plan is fundamental to achieve a proper and successful data mining project
because the information reflected will be used to complete project's life cy-
cle. Figure 1 depicts main activities in this phase, Business Understanding,
Data Understanding and Data Preparation, that help data miners define
business goals and data sources. This definition is basic to develop a data
mining project and will be used in later phases.
•
Data And Tasks Conception. The Data Model defines all the data sources
and extraction, transformation, loading and integration processes involved
in a data mining project. In order to define them in a formal way some
metamodel must be defined and used. The Task Model defines all the
data mining tasks to be done in the project. The approach here is that a
task model is first defined in terms of types of problems (e.g. clustering
instead of K-means, association instead of a priori, ...) and then refined
in some iterations by a data mining expert. The Task Model uses the Data
Model to establish the data involved in each data mining task. Considering
these models, the main activities involved are Data Understanding and
Preprocessing and Modelling.
