Data Mining

Data mining is a series of methods that aim to discover knowledge from data by applying algorithms. The algorithms for data mining are very diverse, depending on their intended objectives and the computational demand of the problem. Data mining methods have been developed at the intersection of the academic areas of statistics and computer science. Data mining methods can also be classified broadly into supervised and unsupervised learning. In this entry, methods for supervised learning used for prediction are reviewed first, followed by methods for unsupervised learning.

Supervised learning consists of methods applicable to data in which there is an outcome that can be used to determine whether the learning process was successful. The outcome is also commonly referred to as a dependent variable or response ...