Data Mining and Homeland Security

2011 ◽  
pp. 1323-1331
Author(s):  
Jeffrey W. Seifert

A significant amount of attention appears to be focusing on how to better collect, analyze, and disseminate information. In doing so, technology is commonly and increasingly looked upon as both a tool, and, in some cases, a substitute, for human resources. One such technology that is playing a prominent role in homeland security initiatives is data mining. Similar to the concept of homeland security, while data mining is widely mentioned in a growing number of bills, laws, reports, and other policy documents, an agreed upon definition or conceptualization of data mining appears to be generally lacking within the policy community (Relyea, 2002). While data mining initiatives are usually purported to provide insightful, carefully constructed analysis, at various times data mining itself is alternatively described as a technology, a process, and/or a productivity tool. In other words, data mining, or factual data analysis, or predictive analytics, as it also is sometimes referred to, means different things to different people. Regardless of which definition one prefers, a common theme is the ability to collect and combine, virtually if not physically, multiple data sources, for the purposes of analyzing the actions of individuals. In other words, there is an implicit belief in the power of information, suggesting a continuing trend in the growth of “dataveillance,” or the monitoring and collection of the data trails left by a person’s activities (Clarke, 1988). More importantly, it is clear that there are high expectations for data mining, or factual data analysis, being an effective tool. Data mining is not a new technology but its use is growing significantly in both the private and public sectors. Industries such as banking, insurance, medicine, and retailing commonly use data mining to reduce costs, enhance research, and increase sales. In the public sector, data mining applications initially were used as a means to detect fraud and waste, but have grown to also be used for purposes such as measuring and improving program performance. While not completely without controversy, these types of data mining applications have gained greater acceptance. However, some national defense/homeland security data mining applications represent a significant expansion in the quantity and scope of data to be analyzed. Moreover, due to their security-related nature, the details of these initiatives (e.g., data sources, analytical techniques, access and retention practices, etc.) are usually less transparent.

Author(s):  
J. W. Seifert

A significant amount of attention appears to be focusing on how to better collect, analyze, and disseminate information. In doing so, technology is commonly and increasingly looked upon as both a tool, and, in some cases, a substitute, for human resources. One such technology that is playing a prominent role in homeland security initiatives is data mining. Similar to the concept of homeland security, while data mining is widely mentioned in a growing number of bills, laws, reports, and other policy documents, an agreed upon definition or conceptualization of data mining appears to be generally lacking within the policy community (Relyea, 2002). While data mining initiatives are usually purported to provide insightful, carefully constructed analysis, at various times data mining itself is alternatively described as a technology, a process, and/or a productivity tool. In other words, data mining, or factual data analysis, or predictive analytics, as it also is sometimes referred to, means different things to different people. Regardless of which definition one prefers, a common theme is the ability to collect and combine, virtually if not physically, multiple data sources, for the purposes of analyzing the actions of individuals. In other words, there is an implicit belief in the power of information, suggesting a continuing trend in the growth of “dataveillance,” or the monitoring and collection of the data trails left by a person’s activities (Clarke, 1988). More importantly, it is clear that there are high expectations for data mining, or factual data analysis, being an effective tool. Data mining is not a new technology but its use is growing significantly in both the private and public sectors. Industries such as banking, insurance, medicine, and retailing commonly use data mining to reduce costs, enhance research, and increase sales. In the public sector, data mining applications initially were used as a means to detect fraud and waste, but have grown to also be used for purposes such as measuring and improving program performance. While not completely without controversy, these types of data mining applications have gained greater acceptance. However, some national defense/homeland security data mining applications represent a significant expansion in the quantity and scope of data to be analyzed. Moreover, due to their security-related nature, the details of these initiatives (e.g., data sources, analytical techniques, access and retention practices, etc.) are usually less transparent.


2008 ◽  
pp. 3630-3638 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey W. Seifert

A significant amount of attention appears to be focusing on how to better collect, analyze, and disseminate information. In doing so, technology is commonly and increasingly looked upon as both a tool, and, in some cases, a substitute, for human resources. One such technology that is playing a prominent role in homeland security initiatives is data mining. Similar to the concept of homeland security, while data mining is widely mentioned in a growing number of bills, laws, reports, and other policy documents, an agreed upon definition or conceptualization of data mining appears to be generally lacking within the policy community (Relyea, 2002). While data mining initiatives are usually purported to provide insightful, carefully constructed analysis, at various times data mining itself is alternatively described as a technology, a process, and/or a productivity tool. In other words, data mining, or factual data analysis, or predictive analytics, as it also is sometimes referred to, means different things to different people. Regardless of which definition one prefers, a common theme is the ability to collect and combine, virtually if not physically, multiple data sources, for the purposes of analyzing the actions of individuals. In other words, there is an implicit belief in the power of information, suggesting a continuing trend in the growth of “dataveillance,” or the monitoring and collection of the data trails left by a person’s activities (Clarke, 1988). More importantly, it is clear that there are high expectations for data mining, or factual data analysis, being an effective tool. Data mining is not a new technology but its use is growing significantly in both the private and public sectors. Industries such as banking, insurance, medicine, and retailing commonly use data mining to reduce costs, enhance research, and increase sales. In the public sector, data mining applications initially were used as a means to detect fraud and waste, but have grown to also be used for purposes such as measuring and improving program performance. While not completely without controversy, these types of data mining applications have gained greater acceptance. However, some national defense/homeland security data mining applications represent a significant expansion in the quantity and scope of data to be analyzed. Moreover, due to their security-related nature, the details of these initiatives (e.g., data sources, analytical techniques, access and retention practices, etc.) are usually less transparent.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ekaterina Chuprikova ◽  
Abraham Mejia Aguilar ◽  
Roberto Monsorno

<p>Increasing agricultural production challenges, such as climate change, environmental concerns, energy demands, and growing expectations from consumers triggered the necessity for innovation using data-driven approaches such as visual analytics. Although the visual analytics concept was introduced more than a decade ago, the latest developments in the data mining capacities made it possible to fully exploit the potential of this approach and gain insights into high complexity datasets (multi-source, multi-scale, and different stages). The current study focuses on developing prototypical visual analytics for an apple variety testing program in South Tyrol, Italy. Thus, the work aims (1) to establish a visual analytics interface enabled to integrate and harmonize information about apple variety testing and its interaction with climate by designing a semantic model; and (2) to create a single visual analytics user interface that can turn the data into knowledge for domain experts. </p><p>This study extends the visual analytics approach with a structural way of data organization (ontologies), data mining, and visualization techniques to retrieve knowledge from an extensive collection of apple variety testing program and environmental data. The prototype stands on three main components: ontology, data analysis, and data visualization. Ontologies provide a representation of expert knowledge and create standard concepts for data integration, opening the possibility to share the knowledge using a unified terminology and allowing for inference. Building upon relevant semantic models (e.g., agri-food experiment ontology, plant trait ontology, GeoSPARQL), we propose to extend them based on the apple variety testing and climate data. Data integration and harmonization through developing an ontology-based model provides a framework for integrating relevant concepts and relationships between them, data sources from different repositories, and defining a precise specification for the knowledge retrieval. Besides, as the variety testing is performed on different locations, the geospatial component can enrich the analysis with spatial properties. Furthermore, the visual narratives designed within this study will give a better-integrated view of data entities' relations and the meaningful patterns and clustering based on semantic concepts.</p><p>Therefore, the proposed approach is designed to improve decision-making about variety management through an interactive visual analytics system that can answer "what" and "why" about fruit-growing activities. Thus, the prototype has the potential to go beyond the traditional ways of organizing data by creating an advanced information system enabled to manage heterogeneous data sources and to provide a framework for more collaborative scientific data analysis. This study unites various interdisciplinary aspects and, in particular: Big Data analytics in the agricultural sector and visual methods; thus, the findings will contribute to the EU priority program in digital transformation in the European agricultural sector.</p><p>This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 894215.</p>


Web Services ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 618-638
Author(s):  
Goran Klepac ◽  
Kristi L. Berg

This chapter proposes a new analytical approach that consolidates the traditional analytical approach for solving problems such as churn detection, fraud detection, building predictive models, segmentation modeling with data sources, and analytical techniques from the big data area. Presented are solutions offering a structured approach for the integration of different concepts into one, which helps analysts as well as managers to use potentials from different areas in a systematic way. By using this concept, companies have the opportunity to introduce big data potential in everyday data mining projects. As is visible from the chapter, neglecting big data potentials results often with incomplete analytical results, which imply incomplete information for business decisions and can imply bad business decisions. The chapter also provides suggestions on how to recognize useful data sources from the big data area and how to analyze them along with traditional data sources for achieving more qualitative information for business decisions.


High volumes and varieties of data is piling every day from healthcare and related fields. This big data sources if managed and analysed properly will provide vital knowledge. Data mining and data analytics have been playing an important role in extracting useful information from healthcare and related data sources. The knowledge extracted from these data sources guiding patients and healthcare personnel towards improved health conditions. Analytical techniques from statistics, functionalities from data mining and machine learning already proved their capability with significant contributions to healthcare industry. The dominant functionality of data mining is classification which has been in use in mining healthcare data. Though classification is a good learning technique it may not provide a causation model which will be a reliable model for better decision making particularly in the medical field. The present models for causality have limitations in terms of scalability and reliability. The present study is targeted to study causal models for causal relationship mining. This study tried to conclude with some proposals for causal relationship discovery which are efficient, reliable and scalable. The proposed model is going to make use of some qualities of decision trees along with statistical tests and analytics. It is proposed to build the learning models on healthcare big data sources.


Author(s):  
Ann Harrison

The Benetech Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) (http://www.hrdag.org/) analyzes the patterns and magnitude of large-scale human rights violations. Together with local partners, HRDAG collects and preserves human rights data and helps NGOs and other human rights organizations accurately interpret quantitative findings. HRDAG statisticians, programmers, and data analysts develop methodologies to determine how many of those killed and disappeared have never been accounted for - and who is most responsible. This account illustrates how HRDAG pioneered the calculation of scientifically sound statistics about political violence from multiple data sources including the testimony of witnesses who come forward to tell their stories. It describes methodologies that HRDAG analysts have developed to ensure that statistical human rights claims are transparently, demonstrably, and undeniably true.


Author(s):  
Goran Klepac ◽  
Kristi L. Berg

This chapter proposes a new analytical approach that consolidates the traditional analytical approach for solving problems such as churn detection, fraud detection, building predictive models, segmentation modeling with data sources, and analytical techniques from the big data area. Presented are solutions offering a structured approach for the integration of different concepts into one, which helps analysts as well as managers to use potentials from different areas in a systematic way. By using this concept, companies have the opportunity to introduce big data potential in everyday data mining projects. As is visible from the chapter, neglecting big data potentials results often with incomplete analytical results, which imply incomplete information for business decisions and can imply bad business decisions. The chapter also provides suggestions on how to recognize useful data sources from the big data area and how to analyze them along with traditional data sources for achieving more qualitative information for business decisions.


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