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Hi! Welcome to the course Data Mining with Weka.

I'm Ian Witten from the Univers


ity of Waikato in New Zealand and I'm presenting the videos for this course whic
h is being prepared by the Department of Computer Science at the University of W
aikato.
Data mining is a mature technology that a lot of people are beginning to take ve
ry seriously, and a lot of other people find it very mysterious. The real aim of
this course is to take the mystery out of data mining. This is a practical cour
se on how to use the Weka workbench, which you will download as part of the cour
se, for data mining. We explain the basic principles of several popular algorith
ms and how to use them in practical applications.
In the world today, we're overwhelmed with data, every time you swipe your credi
t card, every item you checkout out at the supermarkets every time you send a te
xt, make a phone call, or send an email, or type a key on a computer even, every
time you walk past a security camera. It all generates a little bit of data in
a database. Data mining is about going from the raw data to information. Informa
tion that can be used to make predictions that are useful in the real world.
Let me give you
every item you
ve you a couple
irectly, access
e you.

an example. You're at the supermarket checkout. The till records


bought. At the end, you hand over your loyalty card, and they gi
of percent off, and you give them your name and address and, ind
to all sorts of demographic information about you and people lik

Everybody likes a good bargain. It's been a good day today, because thanks to th
ose coupons they sent you in the mail last week, you've been able to stock up on
some things you wouldn't normally have bought, but that you bought today becau
se they are such a good deal. Next week, they'll send you some more coupons, and
you'll go shopping again and buy some more stuff. They do some experiments on y
ou, you know, they try to figure out how much more you would buy if the price wa
s just that little bit less.
These coupons are kind of a mechanism for personalized pricing. They have access
to all sorts of data from you and people like you, in order to do these experim
ents and figure these things out. Everybody wins: you get your bargains, they se
ll more stuff. It sounds like a good deal to me.
Here's another application. Suppose you and your partner want a child, but you c
an't have one. It's fun trying, but it can get a little bit frustrating, and, ul
timately, very frustrating, perhaps even tragic. In artificial insemination, the
y take some eggs from the woman's ovaries, and then they fertilize them with par
tner or donor sperm, and then, they select from amongst the embryos produced som
e to implant back into the womb. You want to select the ones with the best chanc
e of success of producing a live birth, but you don't want too many live births.
The embryologist has access to all sorts of data on these embryos. I think ther
e are 50-100 pieces of information that they record about individual embryos, an
d they have historical data on which ones produced a live birth, success.
So here's an ideal situation for data mining. We have lots of historical data we
have data on the present
situation, and we want to selectthose embryos that have the best chance of succe
ss. Now, that's a good application for data mining, bringing a live child to cou
ple who wants one.
I talk about data mining and machine learning. Data mining is the application, a
nd machine learning is the algorithms we use. We're talking about using machine
learning algorithms for the purposes of data mining.
This is Data Mining with Weka, so the next question is

What's Weka?

This is a weka her

e, this little bird. It's a flightless bird, kind of like its better known cousi
n the kiwi, found only in the islands of New Zealand. This is what it sounds lik
e, coming to you from New Zealand.
However, in our context, Weka is a data mining workbench. It's an acronym for th
e Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis. We just call it Weka. It contains
a large number of algorithms for classification, and a lot of algorithms for dat
a preprocessing, feature selection, clustering, finding association rules,
things like that. It's a very comprehensive workbench, and it's free, open sourc
e software that you will download as part of this course in the next lesson. It
runs on any computer. It's written in Java, runs on Linux, Windows, Mac.
You'll be able to download it and run it on your workstation and use it during t
he course. You're going to learn how to load data into Weka and look at it; you'
re going to learn about preprocessing, cleaning up data using filters; exploring
it using visualizations, applying classification algorithms, interpreting the o
utput, understanding evaluation methods, evaluation is very important in this ar
ea, understand various representations for models, and how popular machine learn
ing algorithms work, and be aware of common pitfalls with data mining. The ultim
ate goal really is to empower you to use Weka on your own data, and, most import
antly, to understand what it is you are doing.
This is the first class. In this class, you're going to get started with Weka. Y
ou're going to install it; you're going to explore the Weka Explorer interface a
nd explore some data sets; build a classifier; interpret the output of the class
ifier; use filters; and visualize your data set. There's lots of things to do in
this class. Here's the structure of the course.
There are five classes altogether. Each class consists of about six lessons. Cla
ss 1 is Getting started with Weka. Then, we're going to look at Evaluation in Cl
ass 2, Simple classifiers in Class 3, More classifiers in Class 4, and Putting i
t all together in Class 5.
These are the six lessons in Class 1. Each lesson comprises a short video, 5-10
minutes, like this one, followed by an activity. An activity that involves you d
oing something yourself. You don't learn by me talking to you.
You learn by actual doing things. So, we have lots of activities for you that in
volve using the Weka workbench.
In the middle of the class is a mid-class assessment, and at the end there is a
post-class assessment. The marks
for these are combined, and if you get more than 70%, you will get a signed cert
ificate from the University of Waikato certifying that you have completed this c
ourse. The activities are an important part of the course, but they are not part
of the assessment. We really think you should do the activities, but you don't
have to do them
for assessment purposes. It's up to you.
As well as that, associated with the course is a textbook called Data Mining. It
discusses
data mining and Weka in depth. It's a great book; I know it's a great book beca
use I wrote it myself with a couple of friends. The publisher has kindly agreed
to make available large chunk this textbook to you online so that you can use it
for background reading. It's only background reading; you don't have to read th
e textbook. It's just if you want to delve into some of the ideas and algorithms
in more depth. That's what it's there for. What you need to do are the activiti
es and the assessments, and watch the videos, of course. That's it.
I just thought I'd show you were I am. I'm in New Zealand, that's where Weka is
from. That's where I'm sitting right now. This is the world as we see it in New

Zealand. We're at the top, you're probably down at the bottom somewhere. We're i
n the top, in the center, and that arrow to the North Island of New Zealand is w
here the University of Waikato is.
That's it for now. There is an activity associated with this lesson, so go ahead
and do it. Of course, you
haven't learned very much in this lesson, so it's not a very important activity.
Don't worry about it too much.
You're not expected to do a lot of reading to do this activity. Just have a go a
nd see how you get on, and I'll see you again in the next lesson. I'm looking fo
rward to that. Goodbye for now.

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