Ans. The major component of a data mining system architecture is as follows (fig. 1.2).
(i) Database, Data Warehouse, or Other Information Repository – This is one or a set of databases, data warehouses, spreadsheets, or other kinds of information repositories. Data cleaning and data integration techniques may be performed on the data.
(ii) Database or Data Warehouse Server – The database or data warehouse- server is responsible for fetching the relevant data, based on the user’s data mining request.
(iii) Knowledge Base – This is the domain knowledge that is used to – guide the search or evaluate the interestingness. of resulting, patterns. Such knowledge can include concept hierarchies, used. to organize attributes or attribute values into different levels of abstraction. Knowledge such as user beliefs, which can be used to assess a pattern. interestingness based on its unexpectedness may also be included Other additional interestingness constraints or thresholds, and mining system knowledge.
(iv) Data Mining Engine – This is essential to data mining and ideally consists. of the set of modules for .task such as characterization, association and correlation analysis, classification, prediction, cluster analysis outlier analysis, and evolution analysis.
(v) Pattern Evaluation Model — This component typically employs interestingness measure and interacts with data mining modules so as to focus the search toward- interesting patterns. Alternately, the pattern evaluation module may be integrated with the mining module, depending on the implementation of the data mining method used. For efficient data mining, it is highly recommended to push the evaluation of pattern interestingness as, deep as possible, into the mining process so as to confine the search to only the interesting patterns.
(vi) User Interface — This module communicates between user and data mining system, allowing the user to ‘interact with the system by specifying a data mining query or. the task providing information to help focus the search, and performing exploratory data mining based On data mining. result. In addition, this component allows the user to browse databases and data warehouse schemes or data structures, evaluate mined patterns, and visualize the patterns in different forms.
