Parsing for Data Mining - ESK-Solutions

Data Mining and What It Solves Today

Data mining is an interdisciplinary subject that includes machine learning, statistics, and database systems. Data mining would be a mathematical subject if we could find trends in large datasets using pen and paper.

Unfortunately, computations are too large-scale, so we need a computer to find the hidden answers lying within our data. On a Venn diagram, the area at the very center where the three topics intersect is the area where data mining resides. But the diagram does not mention an important factor even more necessary for data mining, which we will learn about soon.

When carrying out data mining projects, people often get lost in mathematics, algorithms, and computations. Even building the infrastructure itself (whether on-premises or in the cloud) requires significant time and effort. Often the most important aspect is forgotten until later — "data".

Today, data mining finds many applications —

•     plagiarism detection
•     sentiment analysis based on social media data
•     monitoring discussions on online forums (for national security purposes)
•     fake news detection
•     business analytics

... and much more

Website Parsing for Data Collection

These are some of the latest problems that data is being used to solve today, and the common thread you may have noticed is that all these tasks require data from the internet.

Web data is enormous and growing at a truly massive rate. According to this article, the Washington Post estimates there are currently 305.5 billion pages on the internet. However, you don't need to worry about that many pages. You can use parsing techniques to go through a few thousand pages and extract data from them to find answers to the problem your team is facing. 

Website parsing for competitor price extraction is a complete and reliable solution, unlike other data sources. Moreover, there is minimal chance that web data will not meet your requirements due to the vast amount of data.

This, in turn, may seem complex, but you can select the web pages or data streams that best suit your research and later supplement them as you see fit.

Using Website Parsing as the First Step in Data Mining

Website parsing to create large datasets, which in turn can be used for data mining, was a lengthy process in the early days of computers when people copied and pasted text. But with automated scripts and bots, the time required to create and update a database has been significantly reduced.

While building a new team can be a lengthy process, there are several companies in the market today, like ESK Solutions, that can serve as a bridge between you and the data needed for your research. A drawback of website parsing may be unstructured data — text, images, video, audio, and much more.

However, with intelligent parsers, the various forms of data can be separated and stored in separate databases or S3 containers, making them available in plug-and-play formats and easily used by the Data Mining Engine.