A Review: Data Mining Brainwave

Data mining has been long a topic of many international conferences. The term data mining has pressure many researchers to take part in discovering knowledge. Since data mining become an active research area, many tools have been introduced to the worldwide. However, in order to use such a data mining tool, we must first understand the concepts of data mining, how data mining works and what techniques does it provides. Fundamentally, data mining is related with data, information and knowledge, which concerns on the process of finding relationships and discovering hidden patterns that exists in a large database. This paper presents the definition of data mining from many points of view and covers only six techniques that have common application in the real world situation. In addition, some of data mining application will be cover at the end of this paper

What Are Subject Liaisons When “Collections” and “Subjects” Don’t Matter?

In this interactive lively lunch discussion, participants explored issues around how the traditional subject liaison role is evolving. Users increasingly require functional information support (e.g., for geographic information system (GIS) or data mining) rather than simply domain-specific. At the same time, reports from the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Pilot Library Liaison Institute and others have noted self-conscious trends toward developing liaison roles that engage and support the full research life cycle, as opposed to traditional service models focused on building and promoting library collections as more or less fixed products. Hosts Darby Orcutt, Mira Waller, and Scott Warren outlined some the major theme surrounding the future of these new roles and with participants explored questions that include: What does it mean to be a collections librarian in this new world? What new skills do we need to develop? What old skills should we not lose? How do we adapt both our institutions and our individual staff without sacrificing our (or their) very identities

A novel approach to dynamic profiling of e-customers considering click stream data and online reviews

In this paper, we present an approach for mining change in customer’s behavior for the purpose of maintaining robust profiling model over time. Most of previous studies leave important questions unanswered: In developing B2C e-commerce strategies, how do managers implicitly load customer’s profiles based on their satisfaction over the online store characteristics? And: What kind of feedback segments do they have? Our proposed approach does not force customers to explicitly express their preference information over the online service but rather capture their preference from their online activities. The challenge does not only lay in analyzing how customer’s classifier model change and when it does so but also to adapt it to the customer’s click stream data using a new decision tree generation algorithm which takes as inputs new set of variables; categorical, continuous and fuzzy variables. Customer’s online reviews rates are considered as classes. Experiments show that this work performed well in identifying relevant customer’s stream data to judge the chinese e-commerce website “Tmall”. The extracted values of the website’s features are also useful to identifying the satisfaction level when the customer’s rate is not available.

{MDL4BMF}: Minimum Description Length for Boolean Matrix Factorization

Matrix factorizations—where a given data matrix is approximated by a prod- uct of two or more factor matrices—are powerful data mining tools. Among other tasks, matrix factorizations are often used to separate global structure from noise. This, however, requires solving the ‘model order selection problem’ of determining where fine-grained structure stops, and noise starts, i.e., what is the proper size of the factor matrices. Boolean matrix factorization (BMF)—where data, factors, and matrix product are Boolean—has received increased attention from the data mining community in recent years. The technique has desirable properties, such as high interpretability and natural sparsity. However, so far no method for selecting the correct model order for BMF has been available. In this paper we propose to use the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle for this task. Besides solving the problem, this well-founded approach has numerous benefits, e.g., it is automatic, does not require a likelihood function, is fast, and, as experiments show, is highly accurate. We formulate the description length function for BMF in general—making it applicable for any BMF algorithm. We discuss how to construct an appropriate encoding, starting from a simple and intuitive approach, we arrive at a highly efficient data-to-model based encoding for BMF. We extend an existing algorithm for BMF to use MDL to identify the best Boolean matrix factorization, analyze the complexity of the problem, and perform an extensive experimental evaluation to study its behavior

UVM Big Data? Aggregating Campus Databases and Creating a Data Warehouse to Improve Student Retention Rates at the University of Vermont

One of the biggest concerns of universities across the United States is the student retention rate. Because it is much more cost effective to keep an existing student enrolled than to enroll a new student, improving a university’s retention rate translates to a saving in costs for that institution. UVM’s first-year retention rate is currently 85.8%, which places them above many other public universities, but below most of UVM’s aspirant schools. UVM conducted a study in 2011 in an effort to determine causes of students leaving after their first year, but retention rates since the study have only marginally increased. Some universities have been using data mining techniques to determine factors correlated with student retention, such as living off campus or an income level below the poverty line. This thesis recommends that UVM create a data warehouse aggregating all student-related data from across campus in an attempt to improve student retention. There is currently no central repository of student-related data from sources such as Residential Life, Blackboard, Student Health Services, and Undergraduate Admissions. Data mining techniques could be used with this data warehouse to discover patterns between different fields of data and a student’s likelihood to withdraw from UVM. For example, what if there is a correlation between a student’s dorm view room and their likelihood to leave UVM? How does a student’s frequency of Blackboard use impact their chance of staying enrolled? This thesis explores the technical and logistical considerations involved in a large data warehousing project. While building a data warehouse may seem operationally daunting, the insights it could generate would be very beneficial for decision support for many years

The Diffusion of Modern technologies in Namibia

Keywords: Namibia, Regional Development, Innovation Systems, Planning During the last decade, globalisation and modern technologies have engendered as much challenges as opportunities for economies of many states in several respects. This is especially true for less developed countries such as Namibia. With the rapid introduction of new modern technologies and speedy disposal of the old ones; many nation states face a spatial change. Hypothetically, they respond differently to this challenge. Innovation diffusion implies the questions: by what criteria and for whom? Moreover, diffusion suggests a process of making new technologies adopted or made available over a wide geographically defined area. If indeed, there is a diffusion of innovations in Namibia, how is it taking place? In the age of globalisation, is it global forces that are ‘shipping’ new technologies to Namibia? Could it be that innovations are closely tied to the education system and the country’s multicultural set-up? Or, is it people/companies on the move who carry innovations with? And, what is unique about Namibia, regarding this process? This paper is an attempt to discuss the processes of technology and innovation adoptions in the sectors of agriculture, fisheries and mining in Namibia – in the context of regional and local development. The main research questions focus on: Which factors promotes innovations and which ones impedes innovations, and how does local conditions change, accordingly developing an economy from a resource-based to an information society? This work seeks to develop a theory that considers regional and local development as an output of interacting local actors - a kind of ‘Reflective causation’ of development. According to this approach, the spatiality of innovation adoption and the process of transformation are primarily induced by a network of internal forces motivated by history. In this context, history not from a nationalist perspective but from a spatial viewpoint, forms the basis of a nation’s identity and models a country’s economic development. In addition to an earlier hypothesis, other factors: market strategy, demand conditions, structural elements and global forces do not halt development, they broaden and amplify the spatiality of development. The data, which forms the basis of my analysis, will be drawn from key informant interviews from June to September 2002 in the Republic of Namibia.

Stadium Coltan : artisanal mining, reforms and social change in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo

In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the mining sector has the potential to play a pivotal role in post-conflict reconstruction (World Bank, 2008), and artisanal mining sustains the livelihoods of millions people in the country (PACT, 2010). However, in the last 15 years, minerals from this artisanal mining have been ill-reputed. Eastern DRC has often been characterised by chronic instability and violent conflicts (Autesserre, 2010; Stearns, 2011) because it is widely believed that minerals in this region have attracted the greed of national and foreign armed groups, who benefit from the mining business. Although this ‘greed hypothesis’ has been criticised for its inconsistent performance in explaining resource-related conflicts (Le Billon, 2010; Ross, 2006), various national and international reform initiatives have gained momentum (Verbruggen et al., 2011). These initiatives aim to make the Congolese artisanal mining sector more transparent and to prevent ‘conflict minerals’ from entering the international market. In 2014, 13 reform initiatives—10 focusing on 3T (tantalum, tin and tungsten) and three on gold—were operational in eastern DRC (Cuvelier et al. 2014: 5). The implicit assumptions are that mining reforms will fully ‘clean’ artisanal mining of violence and corruption and that this will contribute to sustaining people’s livelihoods (Garrett and Mitchell, 2009: 12). This study investigated initiatives intended to ‘formalise’ artisanal mining in DRC—in other words, they aimed to bring mining under state control. The study especially focuses on the effects of one among these initiatives—the ITRI Tin Supply Chain Initiative (iTSCi)—on two groups of actors: miners (creuseurs) and middlemen (négociants). This thesis thus presents a fine-grained case study of the iTSCi. Designed by the International Tin Research Institute in 2009, iTSCi provides a means of determining the origin of 3T and documenting the trading chain for these minerals by ‘tagging and bagging’ the loads of 3T near miners’ shafts (at postes d’achat/selling points or buying stations), at counting offices (comptoirs) and in mineral depots, before the minerals are exported through the international market. This is a qualitative study undertaken at three coltan mining sites of northern Katanga: Kahendwa, Kisengo and Mai-Baridi. Coltan has been extracted at these sites since 2007. From March 2013 to September 2014, data were collected using participant observation of people’s practices (extraction/sale of coltan and various types of interactions between trading houses, cooperatives, mineworkers (creuseurs) and middlemen (négociants), as well as detailed in-depth interviews with creuseurs, négociants and their households. Data were also collected from the staff of mining cooperatives, trading houses, state authorities and civil servants—predominantly of the Service d’Assistance et d’Encadrement du Small-Scale Mining (SAESSCAM) and the Division des Mines. The last group of informants were a group of clandestine coltan négociants (known as hiboux—literally, ‘owls’), who were followed in the study. The purpose of this research is to study the micro-dynamics of changes after the reforms following the implementation of iTSCi. The study thus provides insights into how iTSCi is concretely implemented and how it has altered the organisation of mining and the trade of coltan. The study also aims to examine how this organisation affected creuseurs and négociants. The main research question of this study is as follows: How have initiatives to reform artisanal mining (iTSCi in particular) affected institutional change, how does this relate to changes in patterns of coltan production and trade, how were creuseurs and négociants affected by these changes, and how did these groups respond in the coltan mining areas of Kahendwa, Kisengo and Mai Baridi (northern Katanga) from 2009 to 2014? Analytically, the study adopted three main theoretical perspectives. First, an actor-oriented approach was taken, building on the premise that individual actors have the agency, knowledge and experience to reflect upon their situation and to respond to changes in their surrounding context (Giddens, 1984). Although the examined mining reforms consist predominantly of ‘ready-made’ techniques such as iTSCi’s ‘tagging and bagging’, analysing reforms with an actor orientation helps to highlight people’s reactions and responses. This includes how reform policies are applied in institutions (e.g. mining cooperatives), how they interact, how they are assigned meaning and how they are negotiated by social actors (Christoplos and Hilhorst, 2009). Second, the study builds on the sociology of economic life, which holds that economic action is a form of social action that is socially ‘embedded’, meaning that it is linked with or dependent on actions and institutions (such as social networks) that are noneconomic in content, goals and processes (Granovetter, 2005). This perspective facilitates the analysis of the livelihoods of négociants, including mechanisms of smuggling minerals into and beyond the mining areas where iTSCi is in force. Third, this thesis introduced the original concept of ‘enclaves of regulations’. These enclaves refer to the mining areas where iTSCi or other reforms are in force. This thesis has shown that, although these ‘enclaves’ appear to be ‘closed’ and insulated from the environment in terms of the locally applied rules for the mining and trading of minerals (e.g. ‘tagging and bagging’), in reality, such closure is not complete. This thesis has demonstrated that it would therefore be more appropriate to consider these ‘enclaves’ as semi-autonomous fields with porous boundaries. Apart from the introduction and the concluding chapters, this thesis is composed of five chapters. Chapter 2 explores the evolution of the mineral sector in the Katanga province. It analyses the history of mining, the initiation of artisanal mining and how the ongoing reforms have been informed by this history. In this chapter, it is shown that there is a long history of the organisation of mining in the Katangese province. The reforms therefore did not enter into a stage of anarchy, or an institutional void, but they added a layer to already existing forms of organisation. Chapter 3 focuses on mining cooperatives as newly introduced institutions aimed at governing the artisanal mining sites. Through a single case study, the chapter analyses how these cooperatives —especially the Coopérative des Artisanaux Miniers du Congo, CDMC—were introduced into the mining areas and how they interacted and blended with pre-existing miners’ organisations. This chapter demonstrates that cooperatives have been an emergent—rather than durable—solution in terms of representing the interests of artisanal miners. In Chapter 4, I provide a different perspective on ‘conflict minerals’. I thus introduce the notion of ‘reform conflicts’ to emphasise that, although ongoing reforms aim to sever the supposed linkages between the artisanal mining business and violent conflicts, these reforms have become a driving force behind the emergence of new conflicts over property rights and access to minerals. Chapter 5 is about livelihoods. It analyses how the reforms have influenced the livelihoods and socioeconomic position of négociants. This chapter also explores what kind of opportunities the reforms have offered to this group of mineral brokers often considered powerful in the mineral supply chain and explains what kind of constraints the négociants have confronted and why they have opted to diversify their livelihood portfolios. The chapter has shown that the reforms have affected this group of mineral brokers in different ways. Some négociants were well off, whereas others have been excluded from the mineral commodity chain. These findings contradict the widespread opinion that négociants are always abusive brokers in the mineral production and commodity chain. Chapter 6 analyses the responses of creuseurs and négociants to iTSCi. Although the mining sites where iTSCi is in force appear to be ‘enclaves of regulations’, I explore the strategies of creuseurs and négociants to bypass iTSCi and the reforms, especially around the coltan trade. This chapter demonstrates that coltan smuggling is a deeply rooted practice. Despite the reforms, smuggling continues in different forms. All of the elements highlighted above suggest that mining reforms have undergone a major shift, from addressing the initial problems associated with ‘conflict minerals’ to creating or reinforcing various types of problems, such as the influence of ‘big men’ in the mining business, coltan smuggling and the emergence of new conflicts over accessing minerals. This means that reform initiatives such as iTSCi should be based on knowledge about the actual situation. Thus, understanding and addressing these new types of problems calls for a comprehensive approach at both local and broader levels.</p

Support Vector Machines. Similarity functions to work with heterogeneous data and classifying documents

Projecte fet en col.laboració amb University of Southern DenmarkThe objective of Data Mining (DM) is to classify information from the real world. That kind of information is commonly heterogeneous data: information that needs different kind of data to be represented. How to deal with heterogeneous data has been usually something DM lacks about because DM is not deeply used with real world problems. Different solutions has been shown and our objective is to show a new one using similarities and Support Vector Machines (SVM). How to use similarities instead of kernels in SVM and later how to combine similarities to work with heterogeneous data. The idea is that any type of data will have a similarity related and then all this similarities will be combined to output a result. What makes this idea powerful is the way we can combine similarities, it can be practically anything while other methods to work with heterogeneous data only do linear combinations.First of all understand how SVM works and what does it means to use similarities instead of Kernels. Later implement in a SVM library what explained before and show it working with an example. We will work with documents so it would be also required to do some NLP, learn about a NLP is another of my goals. Another of our goals is to use OO techniques and get a good design. Make our framework easy to be modified by anybody. Make an easy implementation. The objective is to extend the library used not to fork it

Mining, Power and Sustainable Development: Micro-Politics of Benefits Sharing in Ghana

The last two decades has witnessed the adoption of sustainable development principles within the mining industry, following the publication of the industry’s minerals and mining for sustainable development (MMSD) report in 2002. It has been argued by scholars and industry actors that mining companies can contribute to sustainable development by being environmentally responsible, improving the economic and social well-being of people affected by mining projects as well as creating mechanisms for a plurality of decision-making processes throughout the entire mining life cycle. Sustainable development however, is a contested development concept with no implementation blueprint. Unsurprising therefore, the exact meaning and application of sustainable development in the mining industry has been the subject of increasing academic debate. From the burgeoning literature that explores the links between mining and sustainable development, it is difficult to ascertain what sustainable development means to different actors, and how differences in its conception influences the extent to which mining may or not contribute to sustainable development in practice at the community level. This is critical given that at the community level, unequal power relations may exist and potentially shape how mining led sustainable development costs and benefits are shared. Thus, to fully discern the link between mining and sustainable development, it is imperative to unveil first the sustainable development rationalities of various actors and then how those rationalities or agendas are ritualised in practice taking into account contextual influences such as unequal power relations. Taking the sharing of mining benefits by governments and mining companies as a point of departure, this thesis explores how mining contributes to the sustainable development of communities affected by mining projects in Ghana. It does so by focussing on how mine benefits, in the form of redistributed revenues, are accessed, controlled and used by beneficiary communities. The thesis uses a political ecology analytical approach and draws on qualitative primary research data collected from three communities affected by Newmont Mining Corporation’s project in the Birim North District of Ghana. This thesis argues from the findings that, underlying the limited contribution of mining to sustainable development of mining communities in Ghana is a crisis of mining benefits sharing. The findings of this research show that, different actors including the government, mining companies and mining communities have different conceptions and agendas of sustainable development. Furthermore, within the communities, there are different conceptions of what sustainable development is between the elites and poor or non-elites. Overall, the government defines sustainable development in terms of economic growth; the mining companies, influenced by the need to maintain a social license, consider sustainable development to be about the creation a legacy. Community elites, such as chiefs, consider sustainable development to be about community infrastructure; whereas non-elites within the community, many of whom have lost access to their own farmlands due to mining developments, see sustainable development as that which will improve their livelihoods and economic outcomes. This study reveals that, community power imbalances have ensured that the mineral revenues allocated for community driven sustainable development, are ultimately controlled by local elites. The elites, through their unfettered powers, capture both the decision-making processes and the revenues to pursue their sustainable development agendas, to the detriment of the poor and marginalised non-elites. The elites do this by deploying different strategies to counteract the structures governing the use of the revenues. This thesis contributes empirically to understanding how benefit sharing for sustainable development processes work in practice and explains why some people gain while others lose in this equation. This thesis recommends the redesign of the current benefit sharing models being used by Newmont Mining and the government. The suggested new design will provide opportunities to correct the existing power imbalances and ensure that a sustainable development that benefits the communities as whole is achieved.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Social Sciences, 201