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Publications

NIBIOs employees contribute to several hundred scientific articles and research reports every year. You can browse or search in our collection which contains references and links to these publications as well as other research and dissemination activities. The collection is continously updated with new and historical material.

2003

Abstract

As more data have been amassed and interest in working with the ensuing data sets have grown, methods for organizing and examining the data have evolved. The need to work with these larger amounts of data has led to the development of ‘data mining’ methods and software. Data mining has a somewhat skewed reputation, and has often been characterised as ‘data dredging’ or ‘fishing expeditions’ . However, most of us must admit that such ‘expeditions’ or what one also could call hypothesis-generating approaches where we look for both likely and less likely associations, has occurred within our own research. In principal, generating promising associations is what data mining is all about. In this paper we have applied one of many commercial software available (Enterprise Miner, SAS) on a small dataset merged from a questionnaire data set and the national dairy cattle health and production records. We investigated for patterns separating organic dairy farmers from the conventional ones. The main framework of the data mining approach, some of the core modelling methods and the data mining results are briefly described and assessed.