Three perspectives of data mining

AbstractThis paper reviews three recent books on data mining written from three different perspectives, i.e., databases, machine learning, and statistics. Although the exploration in this paper is suggestive instead of conclusive, it reveals that besides some common properties, different perspectives lay strong emphases on different aspects of data mining. The emphasis of the database perspective is on efficiency because this perspective strongly concerns the whole discovery process and huge data volume. The emphasis of the machine learning perspective is on effectiveness because this perspective is heavily attracted by substantive heuristics working well in data analysis although they may not always be useful. As for the statistics perspective, its emphasis is on validity because this perspective cares much for mathematical soundness behind mining methods

A qualitative study of stakeholders' perspectives on the social network service environment

Over two billion people are using the Internet at present, assisted by the mediating activities of software agents which deal with the diversity and complexity of information. There are, however, ethical issues due to the monitoring-and-surveillance, data mining and autonomous nature of software agents. Considering the context, this study aims to comprehend stakeholders' perspectives on the social network service environment in order to identify the main considerations for the design of software agents in social network services in the near future. Twenty-one stakeholders, belonging to three key stakeholder groups, were recruited using a purposive sampling strategy for unstandardised semi-structured e-mail interviews. The interview data were analysed using a qualitative content analysis method. It was possible to identify three main considerations for the design of software agents in social network services, which were classified into the following categories: comprehensive understanding of users' perception of privacy, user type recognition algorithms for software agent development and existing software agents enhancement

Environmental Repercussions of Gem Mining in Sri Lanka

As an industry, gem mining has both negative and positive impacts on economic and social perspectives. But this has generated a severe negative impact on the environment and health perspectives. Most of these impacts cannot be recovered for an extended period of time while causing the deaths of all living organisms on Earth. This study has portrayed the environmental repercussions of traditional and mechanical gem mining techniques practiced by the gem miners in Ratnapura while discussing the remedies that can be adapted to overcome those environmental impacts with the objective of identifying the environmental repercussion of gem industry in Ratnapura district. The population of this study consisted of the gem mining lands in Ratnapura and out of that selected the five of tunnel gem mine land, backhoe gem mine land and river gem mines land as the sample of this study. Collection of the data was done through the observation and discussions conducted with the gem miners to identify the environmental repercussions of gem mining activities. The analysis of the data was done as a narrative analysis of qualitative research. As a major gem mining country Sri Lanka practiced three techniques for gem mining as tunnel gem mining, backhoe gem mining and river gem mining. Although there is a huge contribution to the economic development of the country, these techniques have several impacts on the environment and many other sources. As an environmental impact there are the contamination of water, erosion of soil, deforestation, losing the nutrients of the soil, loss of animal habitats, loss of biodiversity and many more. To avoid these impacts miners can adapt environmentally friendly methods for gem mining and it is necessary to regulate the mining activities by the government to reduce the impact of mining activities. © 2022 The Authors. Published by Department of Estate Management and Valuation, University of Sri Jayewardenepura Keywords: Environmental repercussions; Gem mining techniques; Remedial measures; Gemmin

Predicting Customer Churn in Banking Industry using Neural Networks

The aim of this article is to present a case study of usage of one of the data mining methods, neural network, in knowledge discovery from databases in the banking industry. Data mining is automated process of analysing, organization or grouping a large set of data from different perspectives and summarizing it into useful information using special algorithms. Data mining can help to resolve banking problems by finding some regularity, causality and correlation to business information which are not visible at first sight because they are hidden in large amounts of data. In this paper, we used one of the data mining methods, neural network, within the software package Alyuda NeuroInteligence to predict customer churn in bank. The focus on customer churn is to determinate the customers who are at risk of leaving and analysing whether those customers are worth retaining. Neural network is statistical learning model inspired by biological neural and it is used to estimate or approximate functions that can depend on a large number of inputs which are generally unknown. Although the method itself is complicated, there are tools that enable the use of neural networks without much prior knowledge of how they operate. The results show that clients who use more bank services (products) are more loyal, so bank should focus on those clients who use less than three products, and offer them products according to their needs. Similar results are obtained for different network topologies

Supporting Governance in Healthcare Through Process Mining: A Case Study

Healthcare organizations are under increasing pressure to improve productivity, gain competitive advantage and reduce costs. In many cases, despite management already gained some kind of qualitative intuition about inefciencies and possible bottlenecks related to the enactment of patients' careows, it does not have the right tools to extract knowledge from available data and make decisions based on a quantitative analysis. To tackle this issue, starting from a real case study conducted in San Carlo di Nancy hospital in Rome (Italy), this article presents the results of a process mining project in the healthcare domain. Process mining techniques are here used to infer meaningful knowledge about the patient careflows from raw event logs consisting of clinical data stored by the hospital information systems. These event logs are analyzed using the ProM framework from three different perspectives: the control flow perspective, the organizational perspective and the performance perspective. The results on the proposed case study show that process mining provided useful insights for the governance of the hospital. In particular, we were able to provide answers to the management of the hospital concerning the value of last investments, and the temporal distribution of abandonments from emergency room and exams without reservation

Integration of decision support systems to improve decision support performance

Decision support system (DSS) is a well-established research and development area. Traditional isolated, stand-alone DSS has been recently facing new challenges. In order to improve the performance of DSS to meet the challenges, research has been actively carried out to develop integrated decision support systems (IDSS). This paper reviews the current research efforts with regard to the development of IDSS. The focus of the paper is on the integration aspect for IDSS through multiple perspectives, and the technologies that support this integration. More than 100 papers and software systems are discussed. Current research efforts and the development status of IDSS are explained, compared and classified. In addition, future trends and challenges in integration are outlined. The paper concludes that by addressing integration, better support will be provided to decision makers, with the expectation of both better decisions and improved decision making processes