ML: Lab 1

Lab 1: Exploring Data

The goals of this lab are:

a) to understand how to use Weka to import data from a CSV file and

b) to understand what concept instances are.

Reading: Chapter 1 and the beginning of Chapter 11

Instructions:

[In groups of two or three]

1. choose a concept, such as breakfast food (as opposed to food), commercial vehicle (as opposed to vehicle), textbook (as opposed to book), liberal arts college, spam or make up your own concept.

2. Create a set of attributes and rules defining the concept based on those attributes.

3. Generate a set of instances of the concept – they can be both positive and negative – and create a comma separated values (CSV) file that can be read by Weka. You need to specify the names of the columns.

4. Pair with another group and exchange csv files. Your goal is to come up with rules that describe the concept instances in the file. When you are done, compare the results with the rules that the other group used to create the data.

Turn in with all of the names of your team members:

A 3-paragraph report on 1) what was the concept you analyzed, 2) how you used Weka to analyze it, and 3) how closely you captured the description of the concept.

In addition, answer the following 2 questions:

What difficulties did you have?

What questions do you have related to the lab?