Data Mining: Where to start?

Question

Hi,

I am developing a service for determining human movement upon the acceleration measurements and I would like to start with the research of data mining and try to apply techniques on the service.

As I am not familiar with the field of data mining I would really appreciate if anyone could recommend any good literature to get some theoretical background and see some applied examples on real-life problems.

Thanks!

Answer 1

This might help, especially if you plan to persist your data in SQL Server.

Answer 2

I haven't watched them myself, but Stanford University's YouTube channel has a series of free lectures on Machine Learning, which might teach you more than you want to know.

Machine learning is a large field which incorporates various different techniques for developing "intelligence". Of particular interest for data mining purposes are subjects including decision tree induction and learning classifier systems. These combine statistical analysis with evolutionary search techniques to attempt to devise rule sets for classifying data.

Some aspects likely to be covered may be of no particular use or interest, such as ant colony optimisation, general genetic search techniques, genetic programming, etc.

Answer 3

If you want a good book on theory, I strongly recommend Introduction to Data Mining by Tan et al.

Answer 4

also, check out:

"Statistical Aspects of Data Mining (Stats 202)" A Stanford lecture at Google

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRsMEl6PHhM

Actual data mining starts on Day 7 of the video series.

Check our RapidMiner and R with Rattle , for two good open-source data mining tools.