A fruitful direction for future data mining research will be the development of techniques that incorporate privacy concerns. Specifically, we address the following question. Since the primary task in data mining is the development of models about aggregated data, can we develop accurate models without access to precise information in individual data records? We consider the concrete case of building a decision-tree classifier from tredning data in which the values of individual records have been perturbed. The resulting data records look very different from the original records and the distribution of data values is also very different from the original distribution. While it is not possible to accurately estimate original values in individual data records, we propose a-novel reconstruction procedure to accurately estimate the distribution of original data values. By using these reconstructed distributions, we are able to build classifiers whose accuracy is comparable to the accuracy of classifiers built with the original data.

Data mining applications place special requirements on clustering algorithms including: the ability to find clusters embedded in subspaces of high dimensional data, scalability, end-user comprehensibility of the results, non-presumption of any canonical data distribution, and insensitivity to the order of input records. We present CLIQUE, a clustering algorithm that satisfies each of these requirements. CLIQUE identifies dense clusters in subspaces of maximum dimensionality. It generates cluster descriptions in the form of DNF expressions that are minimized for ease of comprehension. It produces identical results irrespective of the order in which input records are presented and does not presume any specific mathematical form for data distribution. Through experiments, we show that CLIQUE efficiently finds accurate clusters in large high dimensional datasets.

We consider the problem of analyzing market-basket data and present several important contributions. First, we present a new algorithm for finding large itemsets which uses fewer passes over the data than classic algorithms, and yet uses fewer candidate itemsets than methods based on sampling. We investigate the idea of item reordering, which can improve the low-level efficiency of the algorithm. Second, we present a new way of generating "implication rules," which are normalized based on both the antecedent and the consequent and are truly implications (not simply a measure of co-occurrence), and we show how they produce more intuitive results than other methods. Finally, we show how different characteristics of real data, as opposed to synthetic data, can dramatically affect the performance of the system and the form of the results. 1 Introduction Within the area of data mining, the problem of deriving associations from data has recently received a great deal of attention. The prob...

Classification rule mining aims to discover a small set of rules in the database that forms an accurate classifier. Association rule mining finds all the rules existing in the database that satisfy some minimum support and minimum confidence constraints. For association rule mining, the target of discovery is not pre-determined, while for classification rule mining there is one and only one predetermined target. In this paper, we propose to integrate these two mining techniques. The integration is done by focusing on mining a special subset of association rules, called class association rules (CARs). An efficient algorithm is also given for building a classifier based on the set of discovered CARs. Experimental results show that the classifier built this way is, in general, more accurate than that produced by the state-of-the-art classification system C4.5. In addition, this integration helps to solve a number of problems that exist in the current classification systems. Introduction ...

A major challenge in indexing unstructured hypertext databases is to automatically extract meta-data that enables structured search using topic taxonomies, circumvents keyword ambiguity, and improves the quality of search and profile-based routing and filtering. Therefore, an accurate classifier is an essential component of a hypertext database. Hyperlinks pose new problems not addressed in the extensive text classification literature. Links clearly contain highquality semantic clues that are lost upon a purely termbased classifier, but exploiting link information is non-trivial because it is noisy. Naive use of terms in the link neighborhood of a document can even degrade accuracy. Our contribution is to propose robust statistical models and a relaxation labeling technique for better classification by exploiting link information in a small neighborhood around documents. Our technique also adapts gracefully to the fraction of neighboring documents having known topics. We experimented ...

Mining information and knowledge from large databases has been recognized by many researchers as a key research topic in database systems and machine learning, and by many industrial companies as an important area with an opportunity of major revenues. Researchers in many different fields have shown great interest in data mining. Several emerging applications in information providing services, such as data warehousing and on-line services over the Internet, also call for various data mining techniques to better understand user behavior, to improve the service provided, and to increase the business opportunities. In response to such a demand, this article is to provide a survey, from a database researcher's point of view, on the data mining techniques developed recently. A classification of the available data mining techniques is provided and a comparative study of such techniques is presented.

Classification is an important data mining problem. Although classification is a well-studied problem, most of the current classi-fication algorithms require that all or a por-tion of the the entire dataset remain perma-nently in memory. This limits their suitability for mining over large databases. We present a new decision-tree-based classification algo-rithm, called SPRINT that removes all of the memory restrictions, and is fast and scalable. The algorithm has also been designed to be easily parallelized, allowing many processors to work together to build a single consistent model. This parallelization, also presented here, exhibits excellent scalability as well. The combination of these characteristics makes the proposed algorithm an ideal tool for data min-ing. 1

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Most statistical and machine-learning algorithms assume that the data is a random sample drawn from a station-ary distribution. Unfortunately, most of the large databases available for mining today violate this assumption. They were gathered over months or years, and the underlying pro-cesses generating them changed during this time, sometimes radically. Although a number of algorithms have been pro-posed for learning time-changing concepts, they generally do not scale well to very large databases. In this paper we propose an efficient algorithm for mining decision trees from continuously-changing data streams, based on the ultra-fast VFDT decision tree learner. This algorithm, called CVFDT, stays current while making the most of old data by growing an alternative subtree whenever an old one becomes ques-tionable, and replacing the old with the new when the new becomes more accurate. CVFDT learns a model which is similar in accuracy to the one that would be learned by reapplying VFDT to a moving window of examples every time a new example arrives, but with O(1) complexity per example, as opposed to O(w), where w is the size of the window. Experiments on a set of large time-changing data streams demonstrate the utility of this approach.

The emerging data mining tools and systems lead naturally to the demand of a powerful data mining query language, on top of which manyinteractive and #exible graphical user interfaces can be developed. This motivates us to design a data mining query language, DMQL, for mining di#erent kinds of knowledge in relational databases. Portions of the proposed DMQL language have been implemented in our DBMiner system for interactive mining of multiple-level knowledge in relational databases. 1 Introduction Data mining is a promising #eld with #ourishing R