Stages and Goals of Data Mining

Data Mining is an analytic process designed to explore data (usually large amounts of data - typically business or market related) in search of consistent patterns and/or systematic relationships between variables, and then to validate the findings by applying the detected patterns to new subsets of data. The process of data mining consists of three stages:
1. Initial exploration :
This stage usually starts with data preparation which may involve cleaning data, data transformations, selecting subsets of records and - in case of data sets with large numbers of variables ("fields") - performing some preliminary feature selection operations to bring the number of variables to a manageable range. Then, depending on the nature of the analytic problem, this first stage of the process of data mining may involve anywhere between a simple choice of straightforward predictors for a regression model, to elaborate exploratory analyzes using a wide variety of graphical and statistical methods.
2. Model building and validation :
This stage involves considering various models and choosing the best one based on their predictive performance. There are a variety of techniques developed to achieve that goal - many of which are based on so-called "competitive evaluation of models," that is, applying different models to the same data set and then comparing their performance to choose the best. These techniques - which are often considered the core of predictive data mining - include: Bagging (Voting, Averaging), Boosting, Stacking (Stacked Generalizations), and Meta-Learning.
3. Deployment :
The final stage involves using the model selected as best in the previous stage and applying it to new data in order to generate predictions or estimates of the expected outcome.

GOALS OF DATA MINING :
- Prediction : Data mining can show how certain attributes within the data will behave in the future. In such applications, business logic is used coupled with data mining.
- Identification : Data patterns can be used to identify the existence of an item, an event, or an activity. For example, intruders trying to break a system may be identified by the programs executed, files accessed, and CPU time per session.
- Classification : Data mining can partition the data so that different classes or categories can be identified based on combination of parameters.
- Optimization : One eventual goal of data mining may be to optimize the use of limited resources such as time, space, money, or materials and to maximize output variables such as sales or profits under a given set of constraints.

Kitchen Garden: Crop Rotation - Some details (why required, what happens, and so on)

The previous post talked about crop rotation in a brief way, without going into too much detail about why this is required, which are the types of crops for which this is needed, and so on. So, here are some more details.

The whole purpose of rotating crops is to:
1) Ensure that harmful pathogens (insects or disease) specific to the crop do not build up in the soil over a number of years, and;
2) To ensure that soil does not get depleted of specific nutrients due to some plants that are heavy feeding. It is an integral management tool for organic farmers, and homeowners with large vegetable gardens.

Protection against pests and disease: If you want to rotate your crops, and want to avail the best benefits in doing so, make sure you choose plants from different plant type over successive years, and so to be not closely related, else you lose the benefit. If you rotate broccoli and then cabbage, you are not likely to get away form insects and diseases that tend to zero in on the Cruciferae family (to which both cabbage and brocooli belong), and your crop rotation won't do much good, because they are both attacked by the same types of insects and disease.
Now onto the other major reason for crop rotation, being able to fix nutrients.

Adding to nutrients in the soil: There are an awful lot of people who have not done enough research to find out more about crop rotation, in terms of both crops that use up nutrients, and those crops that add nutrients to the soil. For example, if you consider the Fabaceae family of plants (legumes, beans, peas, lentils, alfalfa, clover, caraganas, honeylocusts, etc.), they have a very useful ability to add nitrogen to the soil, under certain conditions. This is a process whereby they are able to extract nitrogen from the air and turn it into the soil (actually in special nodules along the roots) in a form that's usable by plants.
The contra position for these plants is that one should not add nitrogen to the soil if these plants are being grown, since an excess of nitrogen would be harmful for these plants. They are very useful if you have soil that is deficient in nitrogen, and are used by knowledgable gardeners and enthusiasts, especially since these legumes remain in the soil even when the plants die. The idea is by rotating crops all around the garden, section by section, one can spread the ability to enrich nitrogen around the garden.
How does this actually happen ? This is also called "inoculation". Inoculation defines the process by which members of these specific plant families are able to fix atmospheric nitrogen, and this is done in collaboration with a set of bacteria that attach themselves to the roots of these plants. These bacteria are essential to do this fixing. Most decent garden soils already have these necessary bacteria in them, so usually it's not an issue. However, if you don't have some "inoculants" in your soil, you can buy them and put it in the soil. These are mixed into the soil when planting happens, to ensure that the plants will have the proper bacteria when they develop their roots so that they can fix their nitrogen and thrive.

When you read all about the plants that help in increasing nitrogen, what about the plants that suck up all the nutrients from the soil. One of the main families is called nightshades (Tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, and eggplants).
The plants belonging to the nightshades family are part of some of the biggest starvation incidents in history. They are equally famous for being the plants that encourage pests, soil infections, and disease. If you grow them in your garden, then don't grow them in the same soil until other crops have been grown that give the nutrients back, and not before a period of 3-4 years.