Datamining

The special interest group on datamining looks at this highly challenging new field of statistics in business and industry. In one of the first meetings the following view of datamining was adopted:

Data mining is not only the statistical analysis of large databases, using “old statistical techniques”, but also a new challenging field, which involves:

• sampling appropriately the available massive data
• learning the data generating mechanism underlying the data at hand
• being able to deliver results of statistical data analysis in ways that are efficient and communicable to practitioners.
• working at the interplay between statistical modeling and computationally intensive methods.

Statisticians are not the only community that can do data mining; IT scientists deal with it too; we claim that a sound statistical exploratory, modeling and inferential analysis is necessary for a data mining practice which is not only “efficient” but also “sound”, and potentially directable to very specific problems, such as those occurring in customer relationship management. We believe that the role of ENBIS, and of the working group on data mining in particular, is to expose researchers and students in the field of statistics to data mining problems and tools, so that natural skills of statisticians, such as the ability to model real observational data, can be applied to data mining as well.

For further information contact Andrea Ahlemeyer-Stubbe leader of this interest group.