Chapter 3: Networks and Algorithms

Chapter 3: Networks and Algorithms

They?re about Learning and Evolving

In the preceding chapters we discussed some of the electronic retailing applications of data mining and how the technology differs from traditional methods of data analysis. Now we will discuss in more detail how each of the technologies operates on a data set and what insight they can provide about your website. How do neural networks learn from data? How do machine-learning and statistical algorithms segment a database? How do genetic algorithms optimize the entire learning process into a method of evolutionary computing? In short, what are the underlying pattern recognition processes of today?s data mining tools and toolboxes?

In order to understand and fully benefit from the process of pattern recognition, we need to know how this technology came about. We will take a short historical trek through several branches of artificial intelligence and some key events leading to the developments and acceptance of neural networks, machine-learning, and genetic algorithms, with maybe a couple of short excursions into the area of fuzzy logic and an introduction to the statistical algorithms CART (Classification and Regression Trees) and CHAID (CHI-squared Automatic Interaction Detection). These technologies are at the core of most of the current data mining tools, so knowing something about them will help you know how to use them to your advantage and in conjunction with each other to optimize your mining efforts.

Although we will not go into the gory details or math of back-propagation and Kohonen networks...

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Chapter 3: Networks and Algorithms

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