Traditionally the objective of mining was to obtain coal. However, a new generation of miners has appeared at the start of this fourth industrial revolution . They are the miners or data explorers, who instead of looking for coal try to discover patterns in huge volumes of data. The methods used by these new professionals are artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics and database systems.
Data mining is the set of techniques and technologies that allow us to explore large databases in order to find patterns that can provide us with valuable information in making future decisions. The data mining process typically has four main stages:
– Determination of objectives
– Data processing
– Determination of the model
– Analysis of the results
The first of the steps deals with the type of information that the client wants to extract from the database. The second stage is the one that requires more work since it has to select, clean, enrich, reduce and transform the database that the client has provided us. Once we have processed it and it is ready to implement the artificial intelligence algorithm, we have to choose which algorithm will give us the best results.
Choosing the best algorithm for a specific analytical task is very challenging and depends on the problem to be solved. There are basically five different problems in data mining : classification, regression, segmentation, association, and sequence analysis.
To solve these problems there are many algorithms to use, the main ones are: association, clusters, decision tree, linear regression, naive Bayesian classifier, neural network, sequence and series clusters temporary.
Finally, the last step is to analyze the results. Currently this work is being carried out in many business areas such as data security, finance, health, marketing, fraud detection, online searches, natural language processing or the new smart cars .
For these reasons, data mining is becoming one of the jobs with the greatest prospects for the future , since it saves large amounts of money for companies and opens up new business opportunities.
Robert Brunet is a researcher in chemical engineering at the Rovira i Virgili University (Tarragona)
