Knowledge discovery in sociological databases: An application on general society survey dataset

Purpose – The General Society Survey(GSS) is a kind of government-funded survey which aims at examining the Socio-economic status, quality of life, and structure of contemporary society. GSS data set is regarded as one of the authoritative source for the government and organization practitioners to...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zhiwen Pan, Jiangtian Li, Yiqiang Chen, Jesus Pacheco, Lianjun Dai, Jun Zhang
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Tsinghua University Press 2019-12-01
Series:International Journal of Crowd Science
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/IJCS-09-2019-0023/full/pdf?title=knowledge-discovery-in-sociological-databases-an-application-on-general-society-survey-dataset
Description
Summary:Purpose – The General Society Survey(GSS) is a kind of government-funded survey which aims at examining the Socio-economic status, quality of life, and structure of contemporary society. GSS data set is regarded as one of the authoritative source for the government and organization practitioners to make data-driven policies. The previous analytic approaches for GSS data set are designed by combining expert knowledges and simple statistics. By utilizing the emerging data mining algorithms, we proposed a comprehensive data management and data mining approach for GSS data sets. Design/methodology/approach – The approach are designed to be operated in a two-phase manner: a data management phase which can improve the quality of GSS data by performing attribute pre-processing and filter-based attribute selection; a data mining phase which can extract hidden knowledge from the data set by performing data mining analysis including prediction analysis, classification analysis, association analysis and clustering analysis. Findings – According to experimental evaluation results, the paper have the following findings: Performing attribute selection on GSS data set can increase the performance of both classification analysis and clustering analysis; all the data mining analysis can effectively extract hidden knowledge from the GSS data set; the knowledge generated by different data mining analysis can somehow cross-validate each other. Originality/value – By leveraging the power of data mining techniques, the proposed approach can explore knowledge in a fine-grained manner with minimum human interference. Experiments on Chinese General Social Survey data set are conducted at the end to evaluate the performance of our approach.
ISSN:2398-7294