Today’s age is data-dominated, and at every moment tremendous data is created, stored, and used. In this data-driven world, extracting knowledge from the data can be difficult. The concept of data mining came into existence when huge amounts of data were created from multiple resources by combining artificial intelligence and statistics for analysing large data sets to discover useful information.
In this article, we will learn the challenges that are faced while mining data. Before that, let us first give you a brief glimpse at what data mining is.
Table of Contents
What is Data Mining?
Data mining is defined as the process of extracting knowledge from large data sets in the form of correlations and patterns used to increase sales, decrease costs for the organisations and improve customer loyalty, etc. Over the last couple of decades, the adoption of data mining techniques has accelerated rapidly, by which companies can transform their raw data into useful knowledge.
For organizations, data mining has improved decision-making with insightful data analysis. The data mining techniques can be executed for two main purposes: for describing the target dataset or to predict outcomes using machine learning algorithms. These methods organise and filter data, surface the information from fraud detection and security breaches. Data analytics tools make it easier and faster for extracting relevant insights.
However, the process of data mining does come with certain data mining challenges, which will be discussed in the next section.
Data Mining Challenges
Since the technology is continuously evolving for handling data at a large scale, there are some challenges that leaders face along with scalability and automation, as outlined below:
1. Complex Data
It takes so much time and cost to process large and complex data. Data in the real world is in heterogeneous, structured, unstructured, and semi-structured formats, which could be multimedia that includes images, audio, and video, time series, natural language text, etc. which is difficult to handle to extract required information gathered from different sources in LAN and WAN.
2. Distributed Data
Real-world data stored on different platforms could be in databases, individual systems, or the Internet, which cannot be brought to a centralised repository. Regional offices may have their own servers to store data but an enormous chunk of data won’t be feasible to be stored from all the offices centrally. Thus, for data mining, tools and algorithms need to be developed for mining distributed data.
3. Data Visualisation
Data visualization is the foremost interaction that shows the output rightly to the client. The information is passed on with specific significance as per what it is intended. However, it is difficult to address the information precisely to the end-user. Effective output information, input data, and complex data perception methods must be applied to make the information useful.
4. Domain Knowledge
With the knowledge in the domain, it is easier to dig some information without which getting interesting information from data can be difficult.
5. Incomplete Data
Large data quantities can be inaccurate or unreliable due to the instrument errors used to measure the data. Some customers not willing to share their personal information can result in incomplete data, which can be altered due to system errors resulting in noisy data making the data mining process challenging.
6. Higher Costs
The costs associated with buying and maintaining powerful software, servers, and hardware for handling huge chunks of data can be very high.
7. Privacy and Security
Decision-making strategies require security through sharing data collection for individuals, organisations, and the government. For the customer profiles, private and sensitive information about individuals is collected for understanding the user behavior patterns. An important issue that is faced here is illegal access and the confidential nature of the information.
8. User Interface
The knowledge discovered using data mining tools would be useful if it is interesting and understandable by the user. From good visualisation data interpretation, mining results can help understand user requirements. With the data mining process, users can find patterns, and present and optimise requests for data mining based on the obtained results.
9. Methodologies for Mining Data
Data mining methodology challenges are linked to the approaches and limitations in data mining as well as its versatility, data diversity, domain dimensionality, and controlling noise in the data. Most data sets have exceptions and incomplete information leading to complications in the analysis process and the precision of results.
10. Data Mining Algorithms
The difficulty in data mining approaches, huge databases, and the data flow can lead to the distribution and creation of data mining algorithms, which should be scalable and efficient for extracting information.
11. Performance Issues
The data mining system performance depends on the algorithms and techniques used which can affect the data mining performance. Huge database sizes, data flow, and data mining difficulties can lead to parallel and distributed data mining algorithms creation.
12. Background Knowledge Incorporation
The background knowledge can be accurate and consolidated, with which data mining arrangements can be done reliably. Predictive tasks can make accurate predictions, and descriptive tasks can make useful findings. Due to this gathering and including foundation knowledge can be unpredictable.
13. Data Disclosure
The main areas of concern that need to be addressed are the disclosures for using the data and individual privacy violations and protection of user rights.
Conclusion:
Data mining is a reliable process and one of the most commonly used business techniques to extract data that helps in making decisions and analyse large amounts of data and identifying user behaviour and trends. It must be applied by considering factors such as information extraction costs, database patterns, and information type for which the data analysis won’t be of any use.
However, the process can be difficult at some points and come with some data mining challenges as mentioned above. As genuine data mining begins, more challenges get uncovered, and data mining is achieved by defeating each of these challenges.
