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

Towards association rules


All of this frequent itemset stuff is fine, but we are ultimately on the hunt for association rules, which are much more exciting. Association rules are formed from frequent itemsets, with a few small twists. We are interested in making a statement about the frequent itemsets like this: people who buy vanilla wafers also buy bananas 60% of the time. In order to do so, we need to learn how to calculate a few additional metrics, starting with two we call support and confidence.

Support

If we are looking for frequent itemsets, then we also need a way to express how often we see these sets occurring in baskets, and whether that number qualifies as frequent. If I see {vanilla wafers, bananas} in 90% of baskets, is that considered frequent? What about 50% of baskets? What about 5%? We call this number the support of the itemset. The support is just the number of times we saw that itemset over all the baskets.

To make support more meaningful, and to begin talking about "interestingness...