Page 144 - DCAP208_Management Support Systems

Unit 9: Data Mining

Transaction Databases: A transaction database is a set of records representing transactions, Notes
each with a time stamp, an identifier and a set of items. Associated with the transaction
files could also be descriptive data for the items.

Example: In the case of the video store, the rentals table such as shown in Figure 9.5,
represents the transaction database. Each record is a rental contract with a customer identifier, a
date, and the list of items rented (i.e. video tapes, games, VCR, etc.).
Since relational databases do not allow nested tables (i.e. a set as attribute value),
transactions are usually stored in flat files or stored in two normalized transaction tables,
one for the transactions and one for the transaction items. One typical data mining analysis
on such data is the so-called market basket analysis or association rules in which
associations between items occurring together or in sequence are studied.
Figure 9.5: Fragment of a Transaction Database for the Rentals at OurVideoStore

Source: http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~zaiane/courses/cmput690/notes/Chapter1/

Multimedia Databases: Multimedia databases include video, images, audio and text media.
They can be stored on extended object-relational or object-oriented databases, or simply
on a file system. Multimedia is characterized by its high dimensionality, which makes
data mining even more challenging. Data mining from multimedia repositories may
require computer vision, computer graphics, image interpretation, and natural language
processing methodologies.

Spatial Databases: Spatial databases are databases that, in addition to usual data, store
geographical information like maps, and global or regional positioning. Such spatial
databases present new challenges to data mining algorithms.

Figure 9.6: Visualization of Spatial OLAP

Source: http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~zaiane/courses/cmput690/notes/Chapter1/

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