WPI Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Computer Science Department

KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY AND DATA MINING
RESEARCH GROUP
KDDRG

PROF. CAROLINA RUIZ 
Description | Projects | Members | Publications | Courses | Resources | Schedule of Talks
 

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DESCRIPTION
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The common themes of the research projects in our group are data mining and knowledge discovery in databases. Knowledge discovery is the process of finding general patterns/principles that summarize/explain a set of "observations". Very large databases have become the standard, making it impossible for human beings to mine the data "by hand" looking for interesting patterns. Automated tools are therefore needed to help during the extraction of these patterns. Examples of application domains include astronomical data from the Hubble telescope, data on consumer preferences obtained by credit card companies, medical histories, genomic data, web usage data, etc.

The knowledge discovery process in databases consists of several steps that can be grouped as follows:

  1. Data Integration: Collecting the target data observations from the different data sources, removing noise from the observations, and integrating them into an appropriate format.

  2. Data Mining: Applying a concrete algorithm to find useful and novel patterns in the integrated data.

  3. Evaluation: Interpreting mined patterns, evaluating them according to usefulness/interestingness criteria, and possibly using visualization tools to aid in understanding the patterns graphically.
 

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PROJECTS
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(This list of project is out of date. It will be updated soon. To see current projects, see publications list below.)

Our research projects concentrate mainly on the data mining stage of the knowledge discovery process, though some of them address also the data integration and pattern evaluation stages.

 

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MEMBERS
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