Phenomenal Data Mining: From Data to Phenomena

Phenomenal data mining finds relations between the data and the phenomena that give rise to data rather than just relations among the data. For example, suppose supermarket cash register data does not identify cash customers. Nevertheless, there really are customers, and these customers are characterized by sex, age, ethnicity, tastes, income distribution, and sensitivity to price changes. A data mining program might be able to identify which baskets of purchases are likely to have been made by the same customers. In this example, the receipts are the data, and the customers are phenomena not directly represented in the data. Once the "baskets" of purchases are grouped by customer, the way is open to infer further phenomena about the customers, e.g. their sex, age, etc. This article concerns what can be inferred by programs about phenomena from data and what facts are relevant to doing this.1 We work mainly with the supermarket example, but the idea is general. 1 In a sense,...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2000
• Where: SIGKDD
• Authors: John McCarthy
• Keywords: Customers, Phenomena, Phenomenal Data, SIGKDD 2000