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Data Mining in Homeland Security

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DATA MINING IN HOMELAND SECURITY Abstract
Data Mining is an analytical process that primarily involves searching through vast amounts of data to spot useful, but initially undiscovered, patterns. The data mining process typically involves three major steps—exploration, model building and validation and finally, deployment.

Data mining is used in numerous applications, particularly business related endeavors such as market segmentation, customer churn, fraud detection, direct marketing, interactive marketing, market basket analysis and trend analysis. However, since the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the terrorist attacks of September 11, data mining has increasingly been used in homeland security efforts.

Two of the …show more content…

Stage 2: Model building and validation. This stage involves considering various models and choosing the best one based on their predictive performance (i.e., explaining the variability in question and producing stable results across samples). This may sound like a simple operation, but in fact, it sometimes involves a very elaborate process. There are a variety of techniques developed to achieve that goal - many of which are based on so-called "competitive evaluation of models," that is, applying different models to the same data set and then comparing their performance to choose the best. These techniques - which are often considered the core of predictive data mining - include: Bagging (Voting, Averaging), Boosting, Stacking (Stacked Generalizations), and Meta-Learning.

Stage 3: Deployment. That final stage involves using the model selected as best in the previous stage and applying it to new data in order to generate predictions or estimates of the expected outcome."

Applications
Data mining software allows users to analyze large databases to solve business decision problems. Data mining is, in some ways, an extension of statistics, with a few

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