Data Mining: Advanced Data Analysis Techniques

CHAPTER TWO

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

2.1 Introduction

Data mining applies advanced data analysis techniques to explore the data and identify useful and unexpected patterns and rules that provide relevant knowledge for predicting future outcomes. It can be defined as a process of exploring and analysing large amounts of data with a specific target on discovering significantly important patterns and rules. Data mining helps finding knowledge from raw, unprocessed data. Using data mining techniques allows extracting knowledge from the data mart, data warehouse and, in particular cases, even from operational databases ( I. Lungu and A. Bâra,2012).

Data mining became a vital discovery process for various domains including business where data

According to the Gartner Group (The world 's leading information technology research and advisory company), data mining is the process of discovering meaningful new correlations, patterns and trends by sifting through large amounts of data stored in repositories, using pattern recognition technologies as well as statistical and mathematical techniques(Larose, 2005).

Therefore, the main purpose of data mining consists in applying advanced data analysis techniques on large volumes of data stored in databases, data marts or data warehouses, in order to discover significant patterns, trends, rules, relations and correlations contained within the data, information which would be impossible or very difficult to observe using other data analysis

Focusing on 28 developing countries mostly in Asia and Latin America, Hobcraft et al. (1994) revealed that mother’s and husband’s education, their work status and their residence were more or less associated with child survival. In 1993, Da Vanzo et al in Malaysia revealed a higher risk of death to children born to mothers below 18 and above 40 years of age.Children in sub-Saharan Africa have the highest risk of death in the first month of life and are still leading in under-five mortality rates with one in every nine children dying before their fifth birthday as of 2011(You et al,2014). It is worth noting that the year 2008 recorded a rate of one in seven children (144 per 1000 live births) dying before their fifth anniversary with the highest levels occurring in West and Central Africa. Within 34 countries where under-five mortality exceeded 100 out of 1000 live births in 2008, all except one are in sub-Saharan Africa (You et al, 2010). The rate of improvement in child survival in Sub-Saharan Africa is unsatisfactory to meeting United Nations Millennium Development Goal 4 of reducing under-five mortality rate by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015 as the regionit has the highest risk of death in the first month of life and is among the regions showing the least progress globally (UNICEF, WHO, World