Professor Harry Wechsler

Department of Computer Science

George Mason University

Fairfax, VA 22030

e-mail : wechsler@cs.gmu.edu

web : http://cs.gmu.edu/~wechsler/

           (703) 993-1533 (office)

(703) 993-1530 (sec)

(703)993-1710 (fax)

 

GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY

 

FALL   '2004

       CS 750 Theory and Applications of Data Mining

 

Class Information

001  72028     T   7:20 p.m. –  10:00 p.m.  R    A109

Prerequisites

CS 450 (“databases”), CS 580 (“AI”) or  permission of instructor

Office Hours

T   6:15 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. or by appointment (SITE II - Rm. 461)

 

            Textbook

1. Data Mining : Concepts and Techniques, Han and Kamber, Morgan Kaufmann, 2001

web site for textbook slides  : http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~han/bk

 

References

1.  V. Cherkassky and F. Mulier,  Learning from Data : Concepts, Theory, and Methods,  John Wiley,   1999.

 

         2.   D. Pyle, Data Preparation for Data Mining, Morgan Kaufmann, 1999.

 

3.  R. Baeza-Yates and B. Ribeiro-Neto,  Modern Information Retrieval,  Addison-Wesley, 1999.

 

4.  U. Fayyad, G. Grinstein, and A. Wierse, Information Visualization in Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery,  Morgan Kaufmann, 2002.

 

5.    T. Hastie, R. Tibshirani, and J. Friedman, The Elements of Statistical Learning : Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction, Springer, 2001.

 

 

          Course Description

Concepts and techniques in data mining and their multidisciplinary applications. Topics include data warehousing and databases, data cleaning and transformation, pattern transformation and data compression, concept description, association and correlation rules, data classification and predictive modeling, clustering, performance analysis and scalability, data mining in advanced database systems including text, audio and images, and emerging themes and future challenges related to biometrics and the semantic web.  Term team project and topical review are required.

Motivation

The explosive growth in generating, collecting and storing data has generated an urgent need for new techniques and automated tools that can intelligently assist us in transforming the vast amounts of data into useful information and knowledge. Data mining is a multidisciplinary field, drawing from areas including AI, database technology, data visualization, information retrieval, high performance computing, machine learning, mathematical programming, neural networks, pattern recognition, statistical learning theory, and statistics.  The course provides the graduate students the opportunity to learn about the management and use of large data repositories based upon a multidisciplinary approach.

Goals

The objective of this course is to introduce graduate students to current research, technological advances and trends in data mining.   Data mining, which supports knowledge discovery in databases (KDD), helps with the automated extraction of patterns representing knowledge implicitly stored in large databases, data warehouses, and other massive information repositories.  The course focuses on issues related to the feasibility, usefulness, efficiency, and scalability of automated techniques for the discovery of patterns hidden in large databases.  Students will be exposed to the above topics via lectures and reading assignments, including recent journal and conference papers. Students are expected to complete a term project and to make an in depth presentation on a topic related to data mining.   As data mining has matured, the field is now advancing on three new fronts: (i) ability to mine data in real time; (ii) predictive analysis rather than merely explain past trends; and (iii) analyze messy “unstructured” data.

 

 

 

Follow – Up Studies with Professor Wechsler :  1. INFT 844  -- Pattern Recognition – Spring 2005; 2. CS 667 – Biometrics; 3. Certificate in Biometrics; and 4. PhD dissertation.

 

Grading

(Team) Term Project à 75  %.

In-Depth Science and Technology REVIEW  à 25 %

 

Term Project

Students work are advised to work in teams on the term project.
Scope and range for the project has to be agreed with the instructor.
Task involves meaningful functionality and significant amounts of data.
Project  includes the following  STEPS :


1. Problem definition, requirements analysis and conceptual design.
2. Data selection / sampling.
3. Cleaning and integration / Preprocessing.
4. Data transformation / Data Reduction.
5. Data Mining.
6. Modeling, test & evaluation, and performance assessment.
7. Visualization and knowledge discovery.

Reviews and class presentations are conducted stepwise
throughout the course (see tentative schedule). First a draft for each step is expected
the week the STEP is listed in the tentative schedule listed below.
Based upon feedback received in class the same step is completed and
presented again the following week.

Final (In Class)  Project Presentation (SLIDES) (about 30 minutes)

1.  Survey / Literature Review of  (a) application
and (b) task / functionality , data mining (STEP 5)
and model selection (“training strategy”).

2.    Brief  Description of STEPS 1 – 7.

3.    Performance Evaluation and Assessment of your project.

Final Project Report (HARD COPY) (at most 15 pages)

         Submit Technical Report (TR) that covers your Final Project  Presentation.

 

Tentative Schedule

August 31

Chs. 1: Introduction – Data Warehouses, Databases, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, and the Semantic Web.

September 7

Ch. 2 : Data Warehouses and OLAP Technology;    

STEP 1

September 14

Ch. 3 : Data Transformation and Preprocessing. Biometrics & STEPS 2 - 3

September 21

Ch. 4 :  System Architecture. Machine Learning : DTs (Decision Trees). 

STEP 4

September  28 – October 5

            Ch. 5 :  Concept Description

October 12

Columbus Day Recess

October  19 - 26

Performance Assessment : Training (and Validation), Testing and Evaluation; Ch. 6 : Mining Association Rules : A Priori Algorithm; Clustering: k-means algorithms and LVQ <Learning Vector Quantization> and Classification: RBF (Radial Basis Functions)

November 2

Ch. 7 : Classification and Prediction.

 

November 9

Ch. 8 : Cluster Analysis. STEP 5

November 16

Ch. 9 : Mining Complex Types of Data. Spatial and Temporal Data Mining

STEPS  6 - 7

November  23

Statistical Learning Theory (SLT), Generalization and Prediction Risk, Structural Risk Minimization (SRM),  and Support Vector Machines (SVM).

November 30

FINAL  PROJECT   PRESENTATION

December  7

FINAL  PROJECT   PRESENTATION