Course Data Mining in Practise

February, 10-12, 2011
Department of Computer Science, Celestijnenlaan 200A, Heverlee.

Organised by LICT (Leuven Information and Communication Technology Centre)

Modern information and communication technology is increasingly capable of collecting and generating large amounts of data that need to be analyzed to become useful or profitable. In fact, these amounts quickly become too large for immediate human understanding, leading to a situation in which 'we are drowning in data but starved for knowledge'.

Data mining represents an essential technology to transform such data into knowledge. It allows the automated discovery of interesting regularities or anomalies in large databases, thereby surpassing standard statistical summarizing. Typical tasks include the construction of predictive and descriptive models for classification, regression, clustering, associations, and probabilistic inference.

We present a course that provides a gentle introduction to data mining for professionals who need to analyze data themselves, interpret results obtained using data mining techniques, or give guidance to data analysts. The course introduces the principles, techniques and methodology of data mining. It provides the attendants with an overview of the wide variety of data mining techniques available, insight in which techniques are useful for what kind of tasks, and expertise with practical data mining tools.