A Programmer’s Guide to
Data Mining
The Ancient Art of the Numerati
Ron Zacharski
,A Programmer’s Guide to Data Mining: The Ancient Art of the Numerati
www.guidetodatamining.com
by Ron Zacharski
Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 license
Attribution information for all photographs is available on the website.
Thanks to ...
my son Adam
my wife Cheryl
Roper
Roz and Bodhi
also a huge thanks to all the photographers who put their work in the Creative Commons
ii
, INTRO
Preface
If you continue this simple practice every day, you
will obtain some wonderful power. Before you
attain it, it is something wonderful, but after you
attain it, it is nothing special.
Shunryu Suzuki
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.
Before you work through this book you might think that systems like Pandora, Amazon's
recommendations, and automatic data mining for terrorists, must be very complex and the
math behind the algorithms must be extremely complex requiring a PhD to understand. You
might think the people who work on developing these systems are like rocket scientists. One
goal I have for this book is to pull back this curtain of complexity and show some of the
rudimentary methods involved. Granted there are super-smart people at Google, the
National Security Agency and elsewhere developing amazingly complex algorithms, but for
the most part data mining relies on easy-to-understand principles. Before you start the book
you might think data mining is pretty amazing stuff. By the end of the book, I hope you will
be able to say nothing special.
The Japanese characters above, Shoshin, represent the concept of Beginner's Mind—the idea
of having an open mind that is eager to explore possibilities. Most of us have heard some
version of the following story (possibly from Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon). A professor is
seeking enlightenment and goes to a wise monk for spiritual direction. The professor
dominates the discussion outlining everything he has learned in his life and summarizing
papers he has written. The monk asks tea? and begins to pour tea into the professor's cup.
And continues to pour, and continues to pour, until the tea over pours the teacup, the table,
and spills onto the floor. What are you doing? the professor shouts. Pouring tea the monk
says and continues: Your mind is like this teacup. It is so filled with ideas that nothing else
will go in. You must empty your mind before we can begin.
iii
, To me, the best programmers are empty cups, who constantly explore new technology
(noSQL, node-js, whatever) with open minds. Mediocre programmers have surrounded their
minds with cities of delusion—C++ is good, Java is bad, PHP is the only way to do web
programming, MySQL is the only database to consider. My hope is that you will find some of
the ideas in this book valuable and I ask that you keep a beginner's mind when reading it. As
Shunryu Suzuki says:
In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities,
In the expert's mind there are few.
iv
Data Mining
The Ancient Art of the Numerati
Ron Zacharski
,A Programmer’s Guide to Data Mining: The Ancient Art of the Numerati
www.guidetodatamining.com
by Ron Zacharski
Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 license
Attribution information for all photographs is available on the website.
Thanks to ...
my son Adam
my wife Cheryl
Roper
Roz and Bodhi
also a huge thanks to all the photographers who put their work in the Creative Commons
ii
, INTRO
Preface
If you continue this simple practice every day, you
will obtain some wonderful power. Before you
attain it, it is something wonderful, but after you
attain it, it is nothing special.
Shunryu Suzuki
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.
Before you work through this book you might think that systems like Pandora, Amazon's
recommendations, and automatic data mining for terrorists, must be very complex and the
math behind the algorithms must be extremely complex requiring a PhD to understand. You
might think the people who work on developing these systems are like rocket scientists. One
goal I have for this book is to pull back this curtain of complexity and show some of the
rudimentary methods involved. Granted there are super-smart people at Google, the
National Security Agency and elsewhere developing amazingly complex algorithms, but for
the most part data mining relies on easy-to-understand principles. Before you start the book
you might think data mining is pretty amazing stuff. By the end of the book, I hope you will
be able to say nothing special.
The Japanese characters above, Shoshin, represent the concept of Beginner's Mind—the idea
of having an open mind that is eager to explore possibilities. Most of us have heard some
version of the following story (possibly from Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon). A professor is
seeking enlightenment and goes to a wise monk for spiritual direction. The professor
dominates the discussion outlining everything he has learned in his life and summarizing
papers he has written. The monk asks tea? and begins to pour tea into the professor's cup.
And continues to pour, and continues to pour, until the tea over pours the teacup, the table,
and spills onto the floor. What are you doing? the professor shouts. Pouring tea the monk
says and continues: Your mind is like this teacup. It is so filled with ideas that nothing else
will go in. You must empty your mind before we can begin.
iii
, To me, the best programmers are empty cups, who constantly explore new technology
(noSQL, node-js, whatever) with open minds. Mediocre programmers have surrounded their
minds with cities of delusion—C++ is good, Java is bad, PHP is the only way to do web
programming, MySQL is the only database to consider. My hope is that you will find some of
the ideas in this book valuable and I ask that you keep a beginner's mind when reading it. As
Shunryu Suzuki says:
In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities,
In the expert's mind there are few.
iv
