Hello!
My name’s Ian Witten, I’m from the University
of Waikato here in New Zealand, and I want
to tell you about our new, free, online course
– Data Mining with Weka.
We’re overwhelmed by data in the world today.
Every time we check out an item at the supermarket,
every time we swipe our credit card, every
time we send an email, every time we type
a keystroke on our computer, every time we
make a phone call, send a text, walk past
a security camera – we all generate a little
bit of data.
Data mining is about taking this raw data,
and transforming it into something more useful:
information, perhaps; or predictions, predictions
about what might happen next, predictions
that can be used in the real world.
The real aim of this course is to take the
mystery out of data mining, to give you some
practical experience actually using the Weka
toolkit to do some mining on the data sets
that we provide, to set you up so that, later
on, you can use Weka to work on your own data
sets and do your own data mining.
It doesn’t involve any programming or anything
like that.
You’re going to be using the tools that
we provide, the Weka tools.
It might help to know a little bit of elementary
statistics, like means, variances, standard
deviations, and so on.
You might see a couple of mathematical formulae,
but I’ll explain those, so don’t worry about that.
You don’t really need any specific mathematical
background.
So that’s it – Data Mining with Weka,
coming soon to a computer near you.
I’m looking forward to it, and I hope to
see you there.
Bye for now!
