Spring 2013: Theory and Applications of Data Mining [CS-659]

General Description and Preliminary List of Topics:
Data mining is the process of automatically discovering useful information in large data repositories. The course covers key concepts and algorithms at the core of data mining. Topics include: preprocessing, model selection, dimensionality reduction, classification, clustering, association analysis, anomaly detection.
Course Format:
Lectures by the instructor. Besides material from the textbook, topics not discussed in the book may also be covered. Research papers and handouts of material not covered in the book will be made available. Grading will be based on homework assignments, exams, and a project. Homework assignments will require some programming. Exams and homework assignments must be done on an individual basis, unless otherwise specified by the instructor. Any deviation from this policy will be considered a violation of the GMU Honor Code.
Course Project:
The project gives you an opportunity to explore in depth a particular topic/area of the course that interests you. The topic of the project, of course, should be related to the material covered in class, but otherwise you are free to select the specific topic. Possible types of projects include:
  • An application research project: The project demonstrates the application of some techniques discussed in class in an application domain (e.g., text mining, bioinformatics, computer vision, image processing, artificial intelligence etc.). Properties, drawbacks, advantages of the used techniques are analyzed within the context of the explored application domain.
  • A theoretical or methodological research project: A study of different classes of models and approaches; proving either theoretically or experimentally properties of known algorithms; designing a new approach.
  • Software and Data:
  • UCI Machine Learning Repository is a repository of databases, domain theories and data generators that are used by the machine learning community for the empirical analysis of machine learning algorithms.
  • UCI Knowledge Discovery in Databases Archive is an online repository of large data sets which encompasses a wide variety of data types, analysis tasks, and application areas
  • Weka is an open source Java package implementing many learning algorithms
  • MALLET is a Java-based package for statistical natural language processing, document classification, clustering, topic modeling, information extraction, and other machine learning applications to text.
  • SVM light and LibSVM are two popular implementations of various SVM algorithms
  • TMG is a Matlab Toolbox that can be used for various tasks in text mining