Data Mining by Mehmed Kantardzic (good book recommendations TXT) 📕

tools and gives the novel developments of feature selection that have emerged in recent years, including causal feature selection and Relief. The book contains real-world case studies from a variety of areas, including text classification, web mining, and bioinformatics.

Saul, L. K., et al., Spectral Methods for Dimensionality Reduction, in Semisupervised Learning, B. Schööelkopf, O. Chapelle and A. Zien eds., MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2005.

Spectral methods have recently emerged as a powerful tool for nonlinear dimensionality reduction and manifold learning. These methods are able to reveal low-dimensional structure in high-dimensional data from the top or bottom eigenvectors of specially constructed matrices. To analyze data that lie on a low-dimensional sub-manifold, the matrices are constructed from sparse weighted graphs whose vertices represent input patterns and whose edges indicate neighborhood relations.

Van der Maaten, L. J. P., E. O. Postma, H. J. Van den Herik, Dimensionality Reduction: A Comparative Review, Citeseer, Vol. 10, February 2007, pp. 1–41.

http://www.cse.wustl.edu/~mgeotg/readPapers/manifold/maaten2007_survey.pdf

In recent years, a variety of nonlinear dimensionality-reduction techniques have been proposed that aim to address the limitations of traditional techniques such as PCA. The paper presents a review and systematic comparison of these techniques. The performances of the nonlinear techniques are investigated on artificial and natural tasks. The results of the experiments reveal that nonlinear techniques perform well on selected artificial tasks, but do not outperform the traditional PCA on real-world tasks. The paper explains these results by identifying weaknesses of current nonlinear techniques, and suggests how the performance of nonlinear dimensionality-reduction techniques may be improved.

Weiss, S. M., N. Indurkhya, Predictive Data Mining: A Practical Guide, Morgan Kaufman, San Francisco, CA, 1998.

This book focuses on the data-preprocessing phase in successful data-mining applications. Preparation and organization of data and development of an overall strategy for data mining are not only time-consuming processes but fundamental requirements in real-world data mining. A simple presentation of topics with a large number of examples is an additional strength of the book.

4

LEARNING FROM DATA

Chapter Objectives

Analyze the general model of inductive learning in observational environments.

Explain how the learning machine selects an approximating function from the set of functions it supports.

Introduce the concepts of risk functional for regression and classification problems.

Identify the basic concepts in statistical learning theory (SLT) and discuss the differences between inductive principles, empirical risk minimization (ERM), and structural risk minimization (SRM).

Discuss the practical aspects of the Vapnik-Chervonenkis (VC) dimension concept as an optimal structure for inductive-learning tasks.

Compare different inductive-learning tasks using graphical interpretation of approximating functions in a two-dimensional (2-D) space.

Explain the basic principles of support vector machines (SVMs).

Specify K nearest neighbor classifier: algorithm and applications.

Introduce methods for validation of inductive-learning results.

Many recent approaches to developing models from data have been inspired by the learning capabilities of biological systems and, in particular, those of humans. In fact, biological systems learn to cope with the unknown, statistical nature of the environment in a data-driven fashion. Babies are not aware of the laws of mechanics when they learn how to walk, and most adults drive a car without knowledge of the underlying laws of physics. Humans as well as animals also have superior pattern-recognition capabilities for such tasks as identifying faces, voices, or smells. People are not born with such capabilities, but learn them through data-driven interaction with the environment.

It is possible to relate the problem of learning from data samples to the general notion of inference in classical philosophy. Every predictive-learning process consists of two main phases:

1. learning or estimating unknown dependencies in the system from a given set of samples, and

2. using estimated dependencies to predict new outputs for future input values of the system.

These two steps correspond to the two classical types of inference known as induction (progressing from particular cases—training data—to a general dependency or model) and deduction (progressing from a general model and given input values to particular cases of output values). These two phases are shown graphically in Figure 4.1.

Figure 4.1. Types of inference: induction, deduction, and transduction.

A unique estimated model implies that a learned function can be applied everywhere, that is, for all possible input values. Such global-function estimation can be overkill, because many practical problems require one to deduce estimated outputs only for a few given input values. In that case, a better approach may be to estimate the outputs of the unknown function for several points of interest directly from the training data without building a global model. Such an approach is called transductive inference in which a local estimation is more important than a global one. An important application of the transductive approach is a process of mining association rules, which is described in detail in Chapter 8. It is very important to mention that the standard formalization of machine learning does not apply to this type of inference.

The process of inductive learning and estimating the model may be described, formalized, and implemented using different learning methods. A learning method is an algorithm (usually implemented in software) that estimates an unknown mapping (dependency) between a system’s inputs and outputs from the available data set, namely, from known samples. Once such a dependency has been accurately estimated, it can be used to predict the future outputs of the system from the known input values. Learning from data has been traditionally explored in such diverse fields as statistics, engineering, and computer science. Formalization of the learning process and a precise, mathematically correct description of different inductive-learning methods were the primary tasks of disciplines such as SLT and artificial intelligence. In this chapter, we will introduce the basics of these theoretical fundamentals for inductive learning.

4.1 LEARNING MACHINE

Machine learning, as a combination of artificial intelligence and statistics, has proven to be a fruitful area of research, spawning a number of different problems and algorithms for their solution. These algorithms vary in their goals, in the available training data sets, and in the learning strategies and representation of data. All of these algorithms, however, learn by searching through an n-dimensional space of a given data set to find an acceptable generalization. One of the most