STATS 19: Fiat Lux Freshman Seminars

Data Mining: Finding Knowledge in Sea of Information

Spring 2006

Instructor: Hongquan Xu
Office: 8955 Math Sciences Bldg
Phone: (310) 206-0035
http://www.stat.ucla.edu/~hqxu/

Time/Place: W 1-1:50pm at LAKRETA 120
Office Hour:  by appointment (at MS 8955)

Announcements

Topics:

Data mining is an emerging field on the interface between artificial intelligence (machine learning) and statistics. The goal is to discover hidden facts contained in large databases.  Application areas include marketing and sales, finance and credit industry, pharmaceutical research and development, manufacturing, and scientific research.  This course will introduce the data mining concepts, methods and applications.  Data mining techniques such as  classification, clustering, association rules,  decision trees, and statistical modeling will be introduced. 

Texts:

  1. "Introduction to Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery"  by Two Crows Corporation. 
  2. "Discovering Knowledge in Data: An Introduction to Data Mining," by D. T. Larose, Wiley, 2005.
     

Grades:  P/NP

Grading Policy:

  1. Class participation and discussion (you cannot pass the class if you miss two or more lectures).
  2. Weekly assignment on reading the texts.
  3. A final project on finding an example of data mining application, probably in groups, and present it to the class.
Resources: