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Introduction
1. Discuss whether or not each of the following activities is a data mining
task.
(a) Dividing the customers of a company according to their gender.
No. This is a simple database query.
(b) Dividing the customers of a company according to their prof-
itability.
No. This is an accounting calculation, followed by the applica-
tion of a threshold. However, predicting the profitability of a new
customer would be data mining.
(c) Computing the total sales of a company.
No. Again, this is simple accounting.
(d) Sorting a student database based on student identification num-
bers.
No. Again, this is a simple database query.
(e) Predicting the outcomes of tossing a (fair) pair of dice.
No. Since the die is fair, this is a probability calculation. If the
die were not fair, and we needed to estimate the probabilities of
each outcome from the data, then this is more like the problems
considered by data mining. However, in this specific case, solu-
tions to this problem were developed by mathematicians a long
time ago, and thus, we wouldn’t consider it to be data mining.
(f) Predicting the future stock price of a company using historical
records.
Yes. We would attempt to create a model that can predict the
continuous value of the stock price. This is an example of the
