A PARISON OF SELECTED DATA MINING TECHNIQUES.docVIP

A COMPARISON OF SELECTED DATA MINING TECHNIQUES By Eric S. Kyper A thesis in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for a Master of Business Administration University of Minnesota Duluth June 2002 A Comparison of selected data mining techniques vs. OLS Regression ABSTRACT Data mining can be defined as the process of retrieving information from a large database. Traditional statistical techniques were not able to analyze large amounts of data in a timely manner, so data mining was born. Modern data mining techniques have been developed by the areas of computer science, management information systems, and statistics. They have resulted in query languages and database organizations that are flexible, fast, and accurate in terms of data storage and retrieval. Search routines and pattern-recognition methods to adapt to these large amounts of data have also been developed. Proponents of data mining claim that it can discover new relationships in raw data, and the techniques themselves can determine what is important within a variety of possible relationships. They claim that the process of asking questions (stating hypothesis) is counterproductive to the data mining process. Extraordinary claims such as these require extraordinary proof. This study takes a small step towards assessing data mining claims by addressing the following questions: Are new data mining regression techniques superior to classical regression? Can data analysis methods implemented naively (through default automated routines) yield useful results consistently? This assessment is done by conducting a 3x3x2 experiment, with the factors varied being regression method, type of function being estimated, and presence of contamination in the data. In each instance default settings were used in the following automated routines: STATISTICA forward stepwise multiple regression, STATISTICA Neural Networks, and Salford Systems MARS software. The assessment criteria for the above methods are: Mean Square