Data Mining with Rattle and R: The Art of Excavating Data for Knowledge Discovery

Graham Williams

Aug 2011 · Springer Science & Business Media

About this ebook

Data mining is the art and science of intelligent data analysis. By building knowledge from information, data mining adds considerable value to the ever increasing stores of electronic data that abound today. In performing data mining many decisions need to be made regarding the choice of methodology, the choice of data, the choice of tools, and the choice of algorithms.

Throughout this book the reader is introduced to the basic concepts and some of the more popular algorithms of data mining. With a focus on the hands-on end-to-end process for data mining, Williams guides the reader through various capabilities of the easy to use, free, and open source Rattle Data Mining Software built on the sophisticated R Statistical Software. The focus on doing data mining rather than just reading about data mining is refreshing.

The book covers data understanding, data preparation, data refinement, model building, model evaluation, and practical deployment. The reader will learn to rapidly deliver a data mining project using software easily installed for free from the Internet. Coupling Rattle with R delivers a very sophisticated data mining environment with all the power, and more, of the many commercial offerings.

About the author

Dr Graham Williams is Senior Director of Analytics with the Australian Taxation Office, and previously Principal Computer Scientist for Data Mining with CSIRO. He is also Visiting Professor and Senior International Scientist with the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Analytics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Adjunct Professor, Data Mining, Fraud Prevention, Security, University of Canberra, and Adjunct Professor, Australian National University. Graham regularly teaches data mining courses and is author of the freely available, open source data mining system, Rattle. He has been involved in many data mining projects for clients from government and industry over his long career. His research developments included ensemble learning (1980's) and hot spots discovery (1990's). He is actively involved in the international artificial intelligence and data mining research communities, particularly as chair of the Pacific Asia Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining conference series and founder and co-chair of the Australasian Data Mining conference series. Graham has editted a number of books and authored many academic and industry papers and reports. His current focus is on making data mining technology readily accessible, ensuring research, innovation and discovery are repeatable and available, and encouraging the free and open sharing of knowledge.