A Practice-Oriented Approach to Teaching Undergraduate Data Mining Course
Dan Li · 2020
Data mining is a fast-growing field of study in Computer Science and Information Systems.Many schools have developed data mining course for undergraduate students.The course content has been well defined and streamlined because of the availability of outstanding data mining textbooks.However, the focus on theoretical contents of data mining makes it hard for undergraduate students to digest, and thus, compromises the overall learning outcome.To create an effective and dynamic learning environment, we introduce a practice-oriented approach.This paper describes how we integrate the hands-on component into the course work to enhance the learning of the core data mining topics including data preprocessing, association mining, classification, cluster analysis, text mining, and visualization.The open-source data mining tool, RapidMiner, is introduced to assist students to explore and digest various data mining processes and algorithms.Overall, the hands-on experience provides students a better insight into data mining functions.