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

Chapter 9. Mining for Data Anomalies

In the previous eight chapters, we have used data mining techniques to identify a wide variety of patterns in data. We have mined social networks, associations, matching pairs, and all sorts of interesting text patterns. Now we are going to turn the tables and use our skills to look for anomalies, or data items that do not match an expected pattern. Data anomalies happen for various reasons, but because they deviate from expectations or stand out in some important way, we can use our data mining knowledge to seek them out. In my toolbox of mining techniques, I like to think of data mining for anomalies as using the claw part of a hammer. Most of the time I am using a hammer to pound nails, but every once in a while, I need to turn the hammer over and use the claw to pull out a nail. Data mining is always about finding interesting patterns, but sometimes the pattern we are seeking is the one nail that is sticking out at a weird angle and needs to be pulled...