Mining Changes for Real-Life Applications

Much of the data mining research has been focused on devising techniques to build accurate models and to discover rules from databases. Relatively little attention has been paid to mining changes in databases collected over time. For businesses, knowing what is changing and how it has changed is of crucial importance because it allows businesses to provide the right products and services to suit the changing market needs. If undesirable changes are detected, remedial measures need to be implemented to stop or to delay such changes. In many applications, mining for changes can be more important than producing accurate models for prediction. A model, no matter how accurate, can only predict based on patterns mined in the old data. That is, a model requires a stable environment, otherwise it will cease to be accurate. However, in many business situations, constant human intervention (i.e., actions) to the environment is a fact of life. In such an environment, building a predictive model is of limited use. Change mining becomes important for understanding the behaviors of customers. In this paper, we study change mining in the contexts of decision tree classification for real-life applications.