COURSE SPECIFICATION

NAME OF COURSE: Data Mining Techniques and Applications COURSE CODE: CS455 / IS455

STATUS (main, optional, LEVEL: (F,A,P,1,2,3,M) UNIT VALUE: TERMS TAUGHT:

Free Choice): Main 3 4 Spring

Department offering course: Course Co-ordinator: Date of course commencement:

Computer Science February
Information Systems
Degree Programmes in which to be offered:
Information Systems, Computer Science
Pre-requisites: Indicate whether a new
Total Contact Hours: 75
IS240/CS240 Databases course or name of course
Lectures/Tutorials: 45
being replaced: New
Practicals: 30
AIMS OF THE COURSE:

The overall aim of this course is to introduce students to modern data mining techniques and their use in business and other areas of applications. In particular, the
course explores basic concepts, principles and techniques of data mining, online analytic processing and data warehousing with emphasis on both the technical
and the practical issues. The course provides students with an understanding in evaluating and comparing data mining solutions for effective use of the solutions in
practice. The course also equips students with some hands-on experience and skills in conducting a data mining project using a data mining software tool, and/or
constructing a data warehouse.

SSST Course Specification

March 2012
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INTENDED LEARNING OUTCOMES
By the end of the course the students
will be able to:
1. Understand basic concepts and
principles of data mining and data
warehousing
2. Understand state-of-art
approaches and techniques in
data mining and visualisation
3. Develop a working application
using a commercial data
mining/data warehousing software
tool.
TRANSFERABLE SKILLS AND
OTHER ATTRIBUTES
1. Oral and written presentation:
ability to express ideas clearly and
precisely
2. Critical thinking: ability to analyse
data in databases and evaluate
possible solutions for real life
applications
3. Team work: ability to collaborate in
applications development projects
4. Group discussions: ability to
participate in group discussions on
a given subject
LEARNING AND TEACHING STRATEGIES ASSESSMENT CRITERIA
TO BE USED: (SHOULD LINK EXPLICITLY TO INTENDED
LEARNING OUTCOMES):
1. Lectures introduce theoretical and 1. 4 major topics tests (40%)
conceptual materials from the
recommended textbooks
2. Tutorials explore the application of theory 2. Written final exam (50%)
and concepts
3. Laboratory sessions provide exercises to 3. Group project (10%)
apply the theory and use data
mining/warehousing software tools
4. Group project enables students to
develop team-work skills and apply what
they have learnt in the course to a
practical problem
LEARNING AND TEACHING STRATEGIES ASSESSMENT CRITERIA
USED: (SHOULD LINK EXPLICITLY TO INTENDED
LEARNING OUTCOMES):
1. Personal and team projects to read, 1. Projects
evaluate and present knowledge.
2. Practical classes and application on real 2. Projects and examinations
life data
3. Projects
4. Practical classes
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March 2012
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COURSE OUTLINE/SYLLABUS:

• Introduction: Concept of data mining. Data mining and KDD. Data mining process. Major data mining tasks. Data mining approaches. Overview of data mining
solutions. Importance of evaluation. Evolution of data mining. Promises and challenges.
• Understanding Data: data and data sets. Data types. Data quality, Data pre-processing. Data summarisation and visualisation.
• Data Mining Techniques I: Problem of cluster detection. Proximity measures. Basic clustering methods: K-means and Agglomeration. Validation and
evaluation of clusters. Overview of other types of clustering methods. Clustering in practice.
• Data Mining Techniques II: Problem of classification. Decision tree induction approach: ID3 and other tree induction solutions. Nearest neighbour approach:
kNN and PEBLS methods. Statistical approach: Naïve Bayes method. Overview of other classification approaches. Evaluation of classifiers. Problem of
overfitting and solutions. Classification in practice.
• Data Mining Techniques III: Problem of association rule discovery. Apriori algorithms for Boolean, generalised and quantitative association rules. Evaluation of
association rules. Other types of association rules. Association rule discovery in practice.
• Data Mining Projects. Data Mining project life cycle. The industry standard: CRISP-DM guideline for data mining. A case study on customer segmentation
• Data Mining software tool WEKA: Overview of WEKA functions. Data Reprocessing in WEKA. WEKA visualisation facilities for data and patterns, WEKA data
mining functions. WEKA evaluation parameters. Choosing the best data mining solutions in WEKA. Overview of data mining software tools.
• Data Warehousing: Goals and characteristics. Differences between data warehouse, data mart and database. Data warehouse architectures. Metadata and
management. Data loading and integration. Various data warehousing technologies in industry. Design issues for building a data warehouse.
• Online Analytic Processing (OLAP): Concepts of Multidimensional cubes. Hierarchies of data abstraction. Operations over multidimensional cubes. OLAP
approaches. OLAP models and systems. Limitations and constraints of OLAP.
• Putting Everything Into Perspective: Database, data warehouse, query, OLAP, data mining and decision support. Data, information and Knowledge in
enterprises. Application areas of data mining. Ethical and professional issues regarding data mining.

KEY TEXTS AND/OR OTHER LEARNING MATERIALS:

Recommended Texts:
• Hongbo Du, Data Mining Techniques and Applications, ISBN 9781844808915.
• Marakas G.M., Modern Data Warehousing, Mining, and Visualization: Core Concepts, Prentice Hall, 2003, ISBN-10: 0131014595.
Additional Reading:
• Rob P. and Coronel C. , Database Systems: Design, Implementation and Management, Thomson Course Technology, 2004, ISBN 0-619-21323-X
• Berry, M. J. A. and Linoff, G., Data Mining Techniques, for Marketing, Sales and Customer Support, 2nd ed, Wiley, 2004, ISBN: 0471470643

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