January 2011
Intermediate to advanced
420 pages
12h 32m
English
Content preview from Practical Applications of Data Mining
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CHAPTER
4
Statistics for Data Mining
4.1 IntroductIon
Statistics is a useful tool in data mining and can be used to analyze or make
inferences about data in order to discover useful information and to draw
statistical conclusions about a dataset in a database. Figure 4.1 illustrates statis-
tical query processing. The population is a collection of objects about which
we try to discover new facts and information. Its member may be known or
unknown. If the population is unknown, then a sample dataset has to be used
to derive facts or trends about the population. On the other hand, if the popu-
lation is known, the entire popula tion may be stor ...