Dr. Anthony Babinec, President of AB Analytics and previously Director of Advanced Products Marketing at SPSS, will present two online courses in data mining at statistics.com, each running from October 7 – November 4. Participants can ask questions and exchange comments with Dr. Babinec via a private discussion board throughout the period. 1. “Data Mining – Unsupervised Techniques” covers key unsupervised learning techniques used in data mining – association rules, principal components analysis, and clustering. This is a hands-on course that includes an integration of supervised and unsupervised learning techniques. 2. “Rule Induction” course covers two main machine-learning approaches to generating, or “discovering,” useful rules that describe the data in large databases. Association learning (producing “association rules” – if you bought “x”, you may also like “y”) will be considered, looking at the industry standard method: APRIORI. As noted above, this is an unsupervised technique. The course also covers two decision tree methods – C4.5 and CHAID. Both are supervised machine learning processes in which classification rules are generated from data in which the class of each record is known (fraud/not-fraud; purchaser/not-purchaser, etc.). The rules can then be applied to similar data in which the class is not known. There is some overlap in coverage between the two courses; #1 is broader and more attentive to the larger data mining context, #2 is deeper and pays greater attention to the algorithms. A tuition discount of 50% is available for “Rule Induction” if you take both courses at the same time: use the coupon code “RULES” (or “RULESA” for academic pricing) when signing up online. As with all online courses at statistics.com, there are no set hours when you must be online, and you can interact with the instructor over a period of 4 weeks via a private discussion board. We estimate you will need about 10 hours per week. For details and registration: http://www.statistics.com/content/courses/datamining.html Peter Bruce statistics.com The leading provider of online professional development in statistics [log in to unmask] 703-522-5410