Top Five Articles in Data Mining

During the last years, I’ve read several data mining articles. Here is a list of my top five articles in data mining. For each article, I put the title, the authors and part of the abstract. Feel free to suggest your favorite ones.

An Introduction to Variable and Feature Selection

Isabelle Guyon and André Elisseeff

Variable and feature selection have become the focus of much research in areas of application for which datasets with tens or hundreds of thousands of variables are available. These areas include text processing of internet documents, gene expression array analysis, and combinatorial chemistry. The objective of variable selection is three-fold: improving the prediction performance of the predictors, providing faster and more cost-effective predictors, and providing a better understanding of the underlying process that generated the data.

Data Clustering: A Review

A.K. Jain, M.N. Murty and P.J. Flynn

Clustering is the unsupervised classification of patterns (observations, data items, or feature vectors) into groups (clusters). The clustering problem has been addressed in many contexts and by researchers in many disciplines; this reflects its broad appeal and usefulness as one of the steps in exploratory data analysis. However, clustering is a difficult problem combinatorially, and differences in assumptions and contexts in different communities has made the transfer of useful generic concepts and methodologies slow to occur. This paper presents an overview of pattern clustering methods from a statistical pattern recognition perspective, with a goal of providing useful advice and references to fundamental concepts accessible to the broad community of clustering practitioners.

From Data Mining to Knowledge Discovery in Databases

Usama Fayyad, Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro and Padhraic Smyth

Data mining and knowledge discovery in databases have been attracting a significant amount of research, industry, and media attention of late. What is all the excitement about? This article provides an overview of this emerging field, clarifying how data mining and knowledge discovery in databases are related both to each other and to related fields, such as machine learning, statistics, and databases.

Nine Laws of Data Mining

Tom Khabaza

In its current form, data mining as a field of practise came into existence in the 1990s, aided by the emergence of data mining algorithms packaged within workbenches so as to be suitable for business analysts. Perhaps because of its origins in practice rather than in theory, relatively little attention has been paid to understanding the nature of the data mining process. The development of the CRISP-DM methodology in the late 1990s was a substantial step towards a standardised description of the process that had already been found successful and was (and is) followed by most practising data miners.

Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures

Leo Breiman

There are two cultures in the use of statistical modeling to reach conclusions from data. One assumes that the data are generated by a given stochastic data model. The other uses algorithmic models and treats the data mechanism as unknown. The statistical community has been committed to the almost exclusive use of data models. This commitment
has led to irrelevant theory, questionable conclusions, and has kept statisticians from working on a large range of interesting current problems. Algorithmic modeling, both in theory and practice, has developed rapidly in fields outside statistics.