Book Image

Mastering Data Mining with Python - Find patterns hidden in your data

By : Megan Squire
Book Image

Mastering Data Mining with Python - Find patterns hidden in your data

By: Megan Squire

Overview of this book

Data mining is an integral part of the data science pipeline. It is the foundation of any successful data-driven strategy – without it, you'll never be able to uncover truly transformative insights. Since data is vital to just about every modern organization, it is worth taking the next step to unlock even greater value and more meaningful understanding. If you already know the fundamentals of data mining with Python, you are now ready to experiment with more interesting, advanced data analytics techniques using Python's easy-to-use interface and extensive range of libraries. In this book, you'll go deeper into many often overlooked areas of data mining, including association rule mining, entity matching, network mining, sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, text summarization, topic modeling, and anomaly detection. For each data mining technique, we'll review the state-of-the-art and current best practices before comparing a wide variety of strategies for solving each problem. We will then implement example solutions using real-world data from the domain of software engineering, and we will spend time learning how to understand and interpret the results we get. By the end of this book, you will have solid experience implementing some of the most interesting and relevant data mining techniques available today, and you will have achieved a greater fluency in the important field of Python data analytics.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Mastering Data Mining with Python – Find patterns hidden in your data
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

What is entity matching?


Finding matching items is one of the oldest tasks in database processing, and as databases get larger and more distributed, this task becomes more and more important. Each time two datasets are merged, questions arise about how to identify duplicates, how to connect items from the first dataset to the similar items in the second data set. When we find ourselves asking Are these two things different even though they have the same name? or Are these other two things the same, even though they have different names? we can apply entity matching techniques to find out the answer.

In light of all this concern with the names for an item, it is perhaps appropriate that this task itself has many names: entity matching, entity disambiguation, object consolidation, duplicate identification, merge/purge, and record linkage, to name a few. We will use the term entity matching in this chapter to generically describe this class of activities.

Consider the following examples where...