CS 391 - Selected Topics: Data Mining Syllabus

Part I: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques

1. What’s it all about?
1.1 Data mining and machine learning
1.2 Simple examples: the weather problem and others
1.3 Fielded applications
1.4 Machine learning and statistics
1.5 Generalization as search
1.6 Data mining and ethics
1.7 Further reading

2. Input: Concepts, instances, attributes
2.1 What’s a concept?
2.2 What’s in an example?
2.3 What’s in an attribute?
2.4 Preparing the input
2.5 Further reading

3. Output: Knowledge representation
3.1 Decision tables
3.2 Decision trees
3.3 Classification rules
3.4 Association rules
3.5 Rules with exceptions
3.6 Rules involving relations
3.7 Trees for numeric prediction
3.8 Instance-based representation
3.9 Clusters
3.10 Further reading

4. Algorithms: The basic methods
4.1 Inferring rudimentary rules
4.2 Statistical modeling
4.3 Divide-and-conquer: constructing decision trees
4.4 Covering algorithms: constructing rules
4.5 Mining association rules
4.6 Linear models
4.7 Instance-based learning
4.8 Clustering
4.9 Further reading

5. Credibility: Evaluating what’s been learned
5.1 Training and testing
5.2 Predicting performance
5.3 Cross-validation
5.4 Other estimates
5.5 Comparing data mining schemes
5.6 Predicting probabilities
5.7 Counting the cost
5.8 Evaluating numeric prediction
5.9 The minimum description length principle
5.10 Applying MDL to clustering
5.11 Further reading

6. Implementations: Real machine learning schemes
6.1 Decision trees
6.2 Classification rules
6.3 Extending linear models
6.4 Instance-based learning
6.5 Numeric prediction
6.6 Clustering
6.7 Bayesian networks

We will also cover selected portions of Part II involving the WEKA software workbench.