COMBINING DATA MINING AND ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS FOR DECISION SUPPORT

Sergio Viademonte and Frada Burstein
Monash University

Abstract

This paper describes an ongoing research project concerned with the application of data mining (DM) in the context of Decision Support. Specifically, this project combines data mining and artificial neural networks (ANN) in a computational model for decision support. Data mining is applied to automatically induce expert knowledge from the historical data and incorporate it into the decision model. The resulting knowledge is represented as sets of knowledge rule bases. An ANN model is introduced to implement learning and reasoning within the proposed computational model. The proposed computational model is applied in the domain of aviation weather forecasting. The paper describes the proposed decision support model, introduces the data pre-processing activities and the data mining approach, the data models used to generate the knowledge rule bases, and their integration with the ANN system. The paper presents evaluation of the performance of the proposed approach and some discussion of further directions in this research.