The Human Factors Issues in Data Mining

Abstract

In our information age, with wide use of computers and the Internet, data is not only more accessible than ever, but also accumulating rapidly every day. Rather than having difficulty in finding data, people now encounter more problems in understanding and digesting useful information from the plethora of data out there. Correspondingly, traditional manual methods of accessing and analyzing data have been losing their power to deal with such enormous amounts of data. Data mining (DM) has become part of the technological response to this data flood since early 1990s. The DM literature has shown little interest in the human role in the DM process, because of an over emphasis on its “automatic and semiautomatic” aspects. Based on a literature review, a detailed function/task analysis, and a preliminary cognitive task analysis, we agree with Romanowski (2002) that the amount of human involvement in DM tasks tends to be significant. This study is based on a combination of analyses of past DM cases, interviews, and field observations. The purpose is to investigate how people actually apply DM techniques in their work, and hence to discover any crucial roles played by humans in the data mining process from a function allocation viewpoint.

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