An introduction to the WEKA data mining system.

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An Introduction to the WEKA Data Mining System
Zdravko Markov
Central Connecticut State University
markovz@ccsu.edu
Ingrid Russell
University of Hartford
irussell@hartford.edu

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Data Mining
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"Drowning in Data yet Starving for Knowledge"
???
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"Computers have promised us a fountain of wisdom but delivered a flood of data"
William J. Frawley, Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro, and Christopher J. Matheus
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Data Mining: "The non trivial extraction of implicit, previously unknown, and potentially
useful information from data"
William J Frawley, Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro and Christopher J Matheus
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Data mining finds valuable information hidden in large volumes of data.
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Data mining is the analysis of data and the use of software techniques for finding
patterns and regularities in sets of data.
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Data Mining is an interdisciplinary field involving:
–Databases
–Statistics
–Machine Learning
–High Performance Computing
–Visualization
–Mathematics

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KDnuggets : Polls : Data Mining Tools You Used in
2005 (May 2005) PollData mining/Analytic tools you
used in 2005 [376 voters, 860 votes total]
• Enterprise-level: (US $10,000 and more)
Fair Isaac, IBM, Insightful, KXEN, Oracle, SAS, and
SPSS
• Department-level: (from $1,000 to $9,999)
Angoss, CART/MARS/TreeNet/Random Forests,
Equbits, GhostMiner, Gornik, Mineset, MATLAB,
Megaputer, Microsoft SQL Server, Statsoft Statistica,
ThinkAnalytics
• Personal-level: (from $1 to $999): Excel, See5
• Free: C4.5, R, Weka, Xelopes
Data Mining Software

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KDnuggets : News : 2005 : n13 : item2
SIGKDD Service Award is the highest service award in the field of data mining and knowledge discovery. It is is given
to one individual or one group who has performed significant service to the data mining and knowledge discovery
field, including professional volunteer services in disseminating technical information to the field, education, and
research funding.
The 2005 ACM SIGKDD Service Award is presented to the Weka team for their development of the freely-available
Weka Data Mining Software, including the accompanying book Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and
Techniques (now in second edition) and much other documentation.
The Weka team includes Ian H. Witten and Eibe Frank, and the following major contributors (in alphabetical order of
last names): Remco R. Bouckaert, John G. Cleary, Sally Jo Cunningham, Andrew Donkin, Dale Fletcher, Steve
Garner, Mark A. Hall, Geoffrey Holmes, Matt Humphrey, Lyn Hunt, Stuart Inglis, Ashraf M. Kibriya, Richard
Kirkby, Brent Martin, Bob McQueen, Craig G. Nevill-Manning, Bernhard Pfahringer, Peter Reutemann, Gabi
Schmidberger, Lloyd A. Smith, Tony C. Smith, Kai Ming Ting, Leonard E. Trigg, Yong Wang, Malcolm Ware, and
Xin Xu.
The Weka team has put a tremendous amount of effort into continuously developing and maintaining the system since
1994. The development of Weka was funded by a grant from the New Zealand Government's Foundation for
Research, Science and Technology.
The key features responsible for Weka's success are:
– it provides many different algorithms for data mining and machine learning
– is is open source and freely available
–it is platform-independent
–it is easily useable by people who are not data mining specialists
–it provides flexible facilities for scripting experiments
–it has kept up-to-date, with new algorithms being added as they appear in the research literature.
Weka Data Mining Software