CLASSIFICATION
Classification is a data mining function that assigns items in a collection to
target categories or classes. The goal of classification is to accurately predict the
target class for each case in the data. For example, a classification model could be
used to identify loan applicants as low, medium, or high credit risks.
What is classification?
Following are the examples of cases where the data analysis task is Classification
−
A bank loan officer wants to analyze the data in order to know which
customer (loan applicant) are risky or which are safe.
A marketing manager at a company needs to analyze a customer with a
given profile, who will buy a new computer.
In both of the above examples, a model or classifier is constructed to predict the
categorical labels. These labels are risky or safe for loan application data and yes
or no for marketing data.
How Does Classification Works?
With the help of the bank loan application that we have discussed above, let us
understand the working of classification. The Data Classification process includes
two steps −
Building the Classifier or Model
Apply the model
Building the Classifier or Model
This step is the learning step or the learning phase.
In this step the classification algorithms build the classifier.
The classifier is built from the training set made up of database tuples and
their associated class labels.
Each tuple that constitutes the training set is referred to as a category or
class. These tuples can also be referred to as sample, object or data points.
Three basic methods to solve the problem:
1. Specifying boundaries:
Here classification is performed by dividing the input space of
potential database tuples into regions where each region is associated with one
class.
2. Using probability distributions .
For any given class ,Cj,P(ti | Cj ) is the PDF for the class evaluated at
one point ,ti.. If a probability of occurrence for each class,P(Cj) is known
(perhaps determine by the domain expert),then P(Cj)P(ti | Cj ) is used to estimate
the probability that ti is in class Cj.
3. Using posterior probabilities :
Given a data value ti, we would like to determine the probability that
ti is in a class Cj. This is denoted by P(Cj | ti )and is called the posterior
probability. One classification approach would be to determine the posterior
probability for each class and then assign ti to the class with the highest
probability.
The major issue is preparing the data for Classification . Preparing the data
involves the following activities −
Data Cleaning − Data cleaning involves removing the noise and treatment
of missing values. The noise is removed by applying smoothing techniques
and the problem of missing values is solved by replacing a missing value
with most commonly occurring value for that attribute.
Relevance Analysis − Database may also have the irrelevant attributes.
Correlation analysis is used to know whether any two given attributes are
related.
Data Transformation and reduction − The data can be transformed by
any of the following methods.
o Normalization − The data is transformed using normalization.
Normalization involves scaling all values for given attribute in order
to make them fall within a small specified range. Normalization is
used when in the learning step, the neural networks or the methods
involving measurements are used.
o Generalization − The data can also be transformed by generalizing it
to the higher concept. For this purpose we can use the concept
hierarchies.
Measuring performance
Determining which is best depends on the interpretation of the
problem by users. The performance of classification algorithms is
usually examined evaluating the accuracy of the classification