The course "Exploratory Data Mining with Application to Social Sciences and Market Research" is a compact two day introduction into the foundations of exploratory data analysis with the Data Mining Software RapidMiner. The methods of exploratory data analysis are often much simpler than statistical modelling schemes. The probably most important aspect of exploratory data mining, however, is the fact that the analyst himself is involved in the analysis process. Hence, exploratory data analysis mainly consists of (semi-)graphical descriptions of data and correlations enabling the analyst to search for patterns or grounding principles. Therefore, exploratory data mining is often the first step in the complete model building process.

The course uses examples and data from social sciences and related topics in order to illustrate the discussed methods. The techniques covered by this course are the visualization of data and simple models together with techniques for getting first insights and hints for further analysis, and the calculation of statistical measures and the analysis of distributions and correlations. Understandable modelling techniques like linear regression or decision trees complement the explorative techniques discussed in this course. Due to a high number of practical exercises, the participants will be able to transfer the gained knowledge to own data mining problems and solve them quickly and easily.