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Characteristics of Anomaly Detection in Data Mining

After reviewing chapter 10 on anomaly detection this week, answer the following questions in essay format.

  1. What are the characteristics of anomaly detection?
  2. What are the detection problems and methods?
  3. What are the statistical approaches when there is an anomaly found?
  4. Compare and contrast proximity and clustering-based approaches.

In an APA7 formatted essay answer all questions above.  There should be headings to each of the questions above as well.  Ensure there are at least two-peer reviewed sources to support your work. The paper should be at least two pages of content (this does not include the cover page or reference page).

Introduction

Rapid advances in data collection and storage technology have enabled organizations to accumulate vast amounts of data. However, extracting useful information has proven extremely challenging. Often, traditional data analysis tools and techniques cannot be used because of the massive size of a data set. Sometimes, the non-traditional nature of the data means that traditional approaches cannot be applied even if the data set is relatively small. In other situations, the questions that need to be answered cannot be addressed using existing data analysis techniques, and thus, new methods need to be devel- oped.

Data mining is a technology that blends traditional data analysis methods with sophisticated algorithms for processing large volumes of data. It has also opened up exciting opportunities for exploring and analyzing new types of data and for analyzing old types of data in new ways. In this introductory chapter, we present an overview of data mining and outline the key topics to be covered in this book. We start with a description of some well-known applications that require new techniques for data analysis.

Business Point-of-sale data collection (bar code scanners, radio frequency identification (RFID), and smart card technology) have allowed retailers to collect up-to-the-minute data about customer purchases at the checkout counters of their stores. Retailers can utilize this information, along with other business-critical data such as Web logs from e-commerce Web sites and customer service records from call centres, to help them better understand the needs of their customers and make more informed business decisions.

Data mining techniques can be used to support a wide range of business intelligence applications such as customer profiling, targeted marketing, workflow management, store layout, and fraud detection. It can also help retailers

From Chapter 1 of Introduction to Data Mining Vipin Kumar. Copyright © 2006 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.

, First Edition. Pang-Ning Tan, Michael Steinbach,

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Chapter 1 Introduction

answer important business questions such as “Who are the most profitable customers?” “What products can be cross-sold or up-sold?” and “What is the revenue outlook of the company for next year?” Some of these questions motivated the creation of association analysis (Chapters 6 and 7), a new data analysis technique.

Medicine, Science, and Engineering Researchers in medicine, science, and engineering are rapidly accumulating data that is key to important new discoveries. For example, as an important step toward improving our understanding of the Earth’s climate system, NASA has deployed a series of Earth-orbiting satellites that continuously generate global observations of the land surface, oceans, and atmosphere. However, because of the size and spatiotemporal nature of the data, traditional methods are often not suitable for analyzing these data sets. Techniques developed in data mining can aid Earth scientists in answering questions such as “What is the relationship between the frequency and intensity of ecosystem disturbances such as droughts and hurricanes to global warming?” “How is land surface precipitation and temperature affected by ocean surface temperature?” and “How well can we predict the beginning and end of the growing season for a region?”

As another example, researchers in molecular biology hope to use the large amounts of genomic data currently being gathered to better understand the structure and function of genes. In the past, traditional methods in molecular biology allowed scientists to study only a few genes at a time in a given experiment. Recent breakthroughs in microarray technology have enabled scientists to compare the behaviour of thousands of genes under various situations. Such comparisons can help determine the function of each gene and perhaps isolate the genes responsible for certain diseases. However, the noisy and high-dimensional nature of data requires new types of data analysis. In addition to analyzing gene array data, data mining can also be used to address other important biological challenges such as protein structure prediction, multiple sequence alignment, the modelling of biochemical pathways, and phylogenetics.

1.1 What Is Data Mining?

Data mining is the process of automatically discovering useful information in large data repositories. Data mining techniques are deployed to scour large databases in order to find novel and useful patterns that might otherwise remain unknown. They also provide capabilities to predict the outcome of a

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1.1 What Is Data Mining?

future observation, such as predicting whether a newly arrived customer will spend more than $100 at a department store.

Not all information discovery tasks are considered to be data mining. For example, looking up individual records using a database management system or finding particular Web pages via a query to an Internet search engine are tasks related to the area of information retrieval. Although such tasks are important and may involve the use of sophisticated algorithms and data structures, they rely on traditional computer science techniques and obvious features of the data to create index structures for efficiently organizing and retrieving information. Nonetheless, data mining techniques have been used to enhance information retrieval systems.

Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery

Data mining is an integral part of knowledge discovery in databases (KDD), which is the overall process of converting raw data into useful information, as shown in Figure 1.1. This process consists of a series of transformation steps, from data preprocessing to postprocessing of data mining results.

Input

Data Information

Data

Preprocessing

Data

Mining Postprocessing

Filtering Patterns

Visualization

Pattern Interpretation

Feature Selection

Dimensionality Reduction

Normalization

Data Subsetting

Figure 1.1. The process of knowledge discovery in databases (KDD).

The input data can be stored in a variety of formats (flat files, spreadsheets, or relational tables) and may reside in a centralized data repository or be distributed across multiple sites. The purpose of preprocessing is to transform the raw input data into an appropriate format for subsequent analysis. The steps involved in data preprocessing include fusing data from multiple sources, cleaning data to remove noise and duplicate observations, and selecting records and features that are relevant to the data mining task at hand. Because of the many ways data can be collected and stored, data

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Chapter 1 Introduction

preprocessing is perhaps the most laborious and time-consuming step in the overall knowledge discovery process.

“Closing the loop” is the phrase often used to refer to the process of in- integrating data mining results into decision support systems. For example, in business applications, the insights offered by data mining results can be integrated with campaign management tools so that effective marketing pro- motions can be conducted and tested. Such integration requires a post- cessing step that ensures that only valid and useful results are incorporated into the decision support system. An example of postprocessing is visualization (see Chapter 3), which allows analysts to explore the data and the data mining results from a variety of viewpoints. Statistical measures or hypothesis testing methods can also be applied during postprocessing to eliminate spurious data mining results.

1.2 Motivating Challenges

As mentioned earlier, traditional data analysis techniques have often encountered practical difficulties in meeting the challenges posed by new data sets. The following are some of the specific challenges that motivated the development of data mining.

Scalability Because of advances in data generation and collection, data sets with sizes of gigabytes, terabytes, or even petabytes are becoming common. If data mining algorithms are to handle these massive data sets, then they must be scalable. Many data mining algorithms employ special search strategies to handle exponential search problems. Scalability may also require the implementation of novel data structures to access individual records in an efficient manner. For instance, out-of-core algorithms may be necessary when processing data sets that cannot fit into the main memory. Scalability can also be improved by using sampling or developing parallel and distributed algorithms.

High Dimensionality It is now common to encounter data sets with hundreds or thousands of attributes instead of the handful common a few decades ago. In bioinformatics, progress in microarray technology has produced gene expression data involving thousands of features. Data sets with temporal or spatial components also tend to have high dimensionality. For example, consider a data set that contains measurements of temperature at various locations. If the temperature measurements are taken repeatedly for an ex- tended period, the number of dimensions (features) increases in proportion to

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1.2 Motivating Challenges

the number of measurements taken. Traditional data analysis techniques that were developed for low-dimensional data often do not work well for such high-dimensional data. Also, for some data analysis algorithms, the computational complexity increases rapidly as the dimensionality (the number of features) increases.

Heterogeneous and Complex Data Traditional data analysis methods often deal with data sets containing attributes of the same type, either continuous or categorical. As the role of data mining in business, science, medicine, and other fields has grown, so has the need for techniques that can handle heterogeneous attributes. Recent years have also seen the emergence of more complex data objects. Examples of such non-traditional types of data include collections of Web pages containing semi-structured text and hyperlinks; DNA data with sequential and three-dimensional structure; and climate data that consists of time series measurements (temperature, pressure, etc.) at various locations on the Earth’s surface. Techniques developed for mining such complex objects should take into consideration relationships in the data, such as temporal and spatial autocorrelation, graph connectivity, and parent-child relationships between the elements in semi-structured text and XML documents.

Data Ownership and Distribution Sometimes, the data needed for analysis is not stored in one location or owned by one organization. Instead, the data is geographically distributed among resources belonging to multiple entities. This requires the development of distributed data mining techniques. Among the key challenges faced by distributed data mining algorithms include (1) how to reduce the amount of communication needed to perform the distributed computation, (2) how to effectively consolidate the data mining results obtained from multiple sources, and (3) how to address data security issues.

Non-traditional Analysis The traditional statistical approach is based on a hypothesize-and-test paradigm. In other words, a hypothesis is proposed, an experiment is designed to gather the data, and then the data is analyzed with respect to the hypothesis. Unfortunately, this process is extremely labour-intensive. Current data analysis tasks often require the generation and evaluation of thousands of hypotheses, and consequently, the development of some data mining techniques has been motivated by the desire to automate the process of hypothesis generation and evaluation. Furthermore, the data sets analyzed in data mining are typically not the result of a carefully designed

 

Last Updated on June 12, 2022

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