Due to increasing use of technology-enhanced educational assessment, data mining methods have been explored to analyse process data in log files from such assessment. However, most studies were limited to one data mining technique under one specific scenario. The current study demonstrates the usage of four frequently used supervised techniques, including Classification and Regression Trees (CART), gradient boosting, random forest, support vector machine (SVM), and two unsupervised methods, Self-organizing Map (SOM) and k-means, fitted to one assessment data. The USA sample (N = 426) from the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) responding to problem-solving items is extracted to demonstrate the methods. After concrete feature generation and feature selection, classifier development procedures are implemented using the illustrated techniques. Results show satisfactory classification accuracy for all the techniques. Suggestions for the selection of classifiers are presented based on the research questions, the interpretability and the simplicity of the classifiers. Interpretations for the results from both supervised and unsupervised learning methods are provided.

Ensemble Data Mining Methods, also known as Committee Methods or Model Combiners, are machine learning methods that leverage the power of multiple models to achieve better prediction accuracy than any of the individual models could on their own. The basic goal when designing an ensemble is the same as when establishing a committee of people: each member of the committee should be as competent as possible, but the members should be complementary to one another. If the members are not complementary, i.e., if they always agree, then the committee is unnecessary---any one member is sufficient. If the members are complementary, then when one or a few members make an error, the probability is high that the remaining members can correct this error. Research in ensemble methods has largely revolved around designing ensembles consisting of competent yet complementary models.

Ensemble Data Mining Methods, also known as Committee Methods or Model Combiners, are machine learning methods that leverage the power of multiple models to achieve better prediction accuracy than any of the individual models could on their own. The basic goal when designing an ensemble is the same as when establishing a committee of people: each member of the committee should be as competent as possible, but the members should be complementary to one another. If the members are not complementary, i.e., if they always agree, then the committee is unnecessary---any one member is sufficient. If the members are complementary, then when one or a few members make an error, the probability is high that the remaining members can correct this error. Research in ensemble methods has largely revolved around designing ensembles consisting of competent yet complementary models.

IntroductionHospitals have seen a rise in Medical Emergency Team (MET) reviews. We hypothesised that the commonest MET calls result in similar treatments. Our aim was to design a pre-emptive management algorithm that allowed direct institution of treatment to patients without having to wait for attendance of the MET team and to model its potential impact on MET call incidence and patient outcomes.MethodsData was extracted for all MET calls from the hospital database. Association rule data mining techniques were used to identify the most common combinations of MET call causes, outcomes and therapies.ResultsThere were 13,656 MET calls during the 34-month study period in 7936 patients. The most common MET call was for hypotension [31%, (2459/7936)]. These MET calls were strongly associated with the immediate administration of intra-venous fluid (70% [1714/2459] v 13% [739/5477] p

We discuss a statistical framework that underlies envelope detection schemes as well as dynamical models based on Hidden Markov Models (HMM) that can encompass both discrete and continuous sensor measurements for use in Integrated System Health Management (ISHM) applications. The HMM allows for the rapid assimilation, analysis, and discovery of system anomalies. We motivate our work with a discussion of an aviation problem where the identification of anomalous sequences is essential for safety reasons. The data in this application are discrete and continuous sensor measurements and can be dealt with seamlessly using the methods described here to discover anomalous flights. We specifically treat the problem of discovering anomalous features in the time series that may be hidden from the sensor suite and compare those methods to standard envelope detection methods on test data designed to accentuate the differences between the two methods. Identification of these hidden anomalies is crucial to building stable, reusable, and cost-efficient systems. We also discuss a data mining framework for the analysis and discovery of anomalies in high-dimensional time series of sensor measurements that would be found in an ISHM system. We conclude with recommendations that describe the tradeoffs in building an integrated scalable platform for robust anomaly detection in ISHM applications.

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks are gaining increasing popularity in many distributed applications such as file-sharing, network storage, web caching, sear- ching and indexing of relevant documents and P2P network-threat analysis. Many of these applications require scalable analysis of data over a P2P network. This paper starts by offering a brief overview of distributed data mining applications and algorithms for P2P environments. Next it discusses some of the privacy concerns with P2P data mining and points out the problems of existing privacy-preserving multi-party data mining techniques. It further points out that most of the nice assumptions of these existing privacy preserving techniques fall apart in real-life applications of privacy-preserving distributed data mining (PPDM). The paper offers a more realistic formulation of the PPDM problem as a multi-party game and points out some recent results.

The purpose of data mining analysis is always to find patterns of the data using certain kind of techiques such as classification or regression. It is not always feasible to apply classification algorithms directly to dataset. Before doing any work on the data, the data has to be pre-processed and this process normally involves feature selection and dimensionality reduction. We tried to use clustering as a way to reduce the dimension of the data and create new features. Based on our project, after using clustering prior to classification, the performance has not improved much. The reason why it has not improved could be the features we selected to perform clustering are not well suited for it. Because of the nature of the data, classification tasks are going to provide more information to work with in terms of improving knowledge and overall performance metrics. From the dimensionality reduction perspective: It is different from Principle Component Analysis which guarantees finding the best linear transformation that reduces the number of dimensions with a minimum loss of information. Using clusters as a technique of reducing the data dimension will lose a lot of information since clustering techniques are based a metric of 'distance'. At high dimensions euclidean distance loses pretty much all meaning. Therefore using clustering as a "Reducing" dimensionality by mapping data points to cluster numbers is not always good since you may lose almost all the information. From the creating new features perspective: Clustering analysis creates labels based on the patterns of the data, it brings uncertainties into the data. By using clustering prior to classification, the decision on the number of clusters will highly affect the performance of the clustering, then affect the performance of classification. If the part of features we use clustering techniques on is very suited for it, it might increase the overall performance on classification. For example, if the features we use k-means on are numerical and the dimension is small, the overall classification performance may be better. We did not lock in the clustering outputs using a random_state in the effort to see if they were stable. Our assumption was that if the results vary highly from run to run which they definitely did, maybe the data just does not cluster well with the methods selected at all. Basically, the ramification we saw was that our results are not much better than random when applying clustering to the data preprocessing. Finally, it is important to ensure a feedback loop is in place to continuously collect the same data in the same format from which the models were created. This feedback loop can be used to measure the model real world effectiveness and also to continue to revise the models from time to time as things change.

List of Top Schools of International Journal of Data Mining Techniques and Applications sorted by citations.

Improving the accuracy of prediction on future values based on the past and current observations has been pursued by enhancing the prediction's methods, combining those methods or performing data pre-processing. In this paper, another approach is taken, namely by increasing the number of input in the dataset. This approach would be useful especially for a shorter time series data. By filling the in-between values in the time series, the number of training set can be increased, thus increasing the generalization capability of the predictor. The algorithm used to make prediction is Neural Network as it is widely used in literature for time series tasks. For comparison, Support Vector Regression is also employed. The dataset used in the experiment is the frequency of USPTO's patents and PubMed's scientific publications on the field of health, namely on Apnea, Arrhythmia, and Sleep Stages. Another time series data designated for NN3 Competition in the field of transportation is also used for benchmarking. The experimental result shows that the prediction performance can be significantly increased by filling in-between data in the time series. Furthermore, the use of detrend and deseasonalization which separates the data into trend, seasonal and stationary time series also improve the prediction performance both on original and filled dataset. The optimal number of increase on the dataset in this experiment is about five times of the length of original dataset.

Missing data is an inevitable aspect of every empirical research. Researchers developed several techniques to handle missing data to avoid information loss and biases. Over the past 50 years, these methods have become more and more efficient and also more complex. Building on previous review studies, this paper aims to analyze what kind of missing data handling methods are used among various scientific disciplines. For the analysis, we used nearly 50.000 scientific articles that were published between 1999 and 2016. JSTOR provided the data in text format. Furthermore, we utilized a text-mining approach to extract the necessary information from our corpus. Our results show that the usage of advanced missing data handling methods such as Multiple Imputation or Full Information Maximum Likelihood estimation is steadily growing in the examination period. Additionally, simpler methods, like listwise and pairwise deletion, are still in widespread use.

This chapter presents theoretical and practical aspects associated to the implementation of a combined model-based/data-driven approach for failure prognostics based on particle filtering algorithms, in which the current esti- mate of the state PDF is used to determine the operating condition of the system and predict the progression of a fault indicator, given a dynamic state model and a set of process measurements. In this approach, the task of es- timating the current value of the fault indicator, as well as other important changing parameters in the environment, involves two basic steps: the predic- tion step, based on the process model, and an update step, which incorporates the new measurement into the a priori state estimate. This framework allows to estimate of the probability of failure at future time instants (RUL PDF) in real-time, providing information about time-to- failure (TTF) expectations, statistical confidence intervals, long-term predic- tions; using for this purpose empirical knowledge about critical conditions for the system (also referred to as the hazard zones). This information is of paramount significance for the improvement of the system reliability and cost-effective operation of critical assets, as it has been shown in a case study where feedback correction strategies (based on uncertainty measures) have been implemented to lengthen the RUL of a rotorcraft transmission system with propagating fatigue cracks on a critical component. Although the feed- back loop is implemented using simple linear relationships, it is helpful to provide a quick insight into the manner that the system reacts to changes on its input signals, in terms of its predicted RUL. The method is able to manage non-Gaussian pdf’s since it includes concepts such as nonlinear state estimation and confidence intervals in its formulation. Real data from a fault seeded test showed that the proposed framework was able to anticipate modifications on the system input to lengthen its RUL. Results of this test indicate that the method was able to successfully suggest the correction that the system required. In this sense, future work will be focused on the development and testing of similar strategies using different input-output uncertainty metrics.

The global Data Mining Software market is experiencing robust growth, driven by the increasing need for businesses to extract valuable insights from massive datasets. The market, estimated at $15 billion in 2025, is projected to witness a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 12% from 2025 to 2033, reaching an estimated $45 billion by 2033. This expansion is fueled by several key factors. The burgeoning adoption of cloud-based solutions offers scalability and cost-effectiveness, attracting both large enterprises and SMEs. Furthermore, advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms are enhancing the accuracy and efficiency of data mining processes, leading to better decision-making across various sectors like finance, healthcare, and marketing. The rise of big data analytics and the increasing availability of affordable, high-powered computing resources are also significant contributors to market growth. However, the market faces certain challenges. Data security and privacy concerns remain paramount, especially with the increasing volume of sensitive information being processed. The complexity of data mining software and the need for skilled professionals to operate and interpret the results present a barrier to entry for some businesses. The high initial investment cost associated with implementing sophisticated data mining solutions can also deter smaller organizations. Nevertheless, the ongoing technological advancements and the growing recognition of the strategic value of data-driven decision-making are expected to overcome these restraints and propel the market toward continued expansion. The market segmentation reveals a strong preference for cloud-based solutions, reflecting the industry's trend toward flexible and scalable IT infrastructure. Large enterprises currently dominate the market share, but SMEs are rapidly adopting data mining software, indicating promising future growth in this segment. Geographic analysis shows that North America and Europe are currently leading the market, but the Asia-Pacific region is poised for significant growth due to increasing digitalization and economic expansion in countries like China and India.

This dataset contains the review results of the manuscript of "A Systematic Review on Privacy-Preserving Distributed Data Mining" authored by Chang Sun, Lianne Ippel, Andre Dekker, Michel Dumontier, Johan van Soest. In the datasets, there are 231 published articles about privacy-perserving distributed data mining. Variables include article DOI, title, authors, keywords, user scenarios, distributed data scenarios, privacy/security definition/proof/analysis, privacy statement, privacy-preserving methods category, privacy-preserving methods (specific), data mining problem, data mining/machine learning methods, experiment data information, accuracy of the methods, efficiency (computation and communication cost), and scalability. The search method and evaluation criteria are described in the paper "A Systematic Review on Privacy-Preserving Distributed Data Mining". The DOI and link to the paper will be provided when the paper gets published.

The worldwide civilian aviation system is one of the most complex dynamical systems created. Most modern commercial aircraft have onboard flight data recorders that record several hundred discrete and continuous parameters at approximately 1Hz for the entire duration of the flight. These data contain information about the flight control systems, actuators, engines, landing gear, avionics, and pilot commands. In this paper, recent advances in the development of a novel knowledge discovery process consisting of a suite of data mining techniques for identifying precursors to aviation safety incidents are discussed. The data mining techniques include scalable multiple-kernel learning for large-scale distributed anomaly detection. A novel multivariate time-series search algorithm is used to search for signatures of discovered anomalies on massive datasets. The process can identify operationally significant events due to environmental, mechanical, and human factors issues in the high-dimensional flight operations quality assurance data. All discovered anomalies are validated by a team of independent domain experts. This novel automated knowledge discovery process is aimed at complementing the state-of-the-art human-generated exceedance-based analysis that fails to discover previously unknown aviation safety incidents. In this paper, the discovery pipeline, the methods used, and some of the significant anomalies detected on real-world commercial aviation data are discussed.

LScDC Word-Category RIG MatrixApril 2020 by Neslihan Suzen, PhD student at the University of Leicester (ns433@leicester.ac.uk / suzenneslihan@hotmail.com)Supervised by Prof Alexander Gorban and Dr Evgeny MirkesGetting StartedThis file describes the Word-Category RIG Matrix for theLeicester Scientific Corpus (LSC) [1], the procedure to build the matrix and introduces the Leicester Scientific Thesaurus (LScT) with the construction process. The Word-Category RIG Matrix is a 103,998 by 252 matrix, where rows correspond to words of Leicester Scientific Dictionary-Core (LScDC) [2] and columns correspond to 252 Web of Science (WoS) categories [3, 4, 5]. Each entry in the matrix corresponds to a pair (category,word). Its value for the pair shows the Relative Information Gain (RIG) on the belonging of a text from the LSC to the category from observing the word in this text. The CSV file of Word-Category RIG Matrix in the published archive is presented with two additional columns of the sum of RIGs in categories and the maximum of RIGs over categories (last two columns of the matrix). So, the file ‘Word-Category RIG Matrix.csv’ contains a total of 254 columns.This matrix is created to be used in future research on quantifying of meaning in scientific texts under the assumption that words have scientifically specific meanings in subject categories and the meaning can be estimated by information gains from word to categories. LScT (Leicester Scientific Thesaurus) is a scientific thesaurus of English. The thesaurus includes a list of 5,000 words from the LScDC. We consider ordering the words of LScDC by the sum of their RIGs in categories. That is, words are arranged in their informativeness in the scientific corpus LSC. Therefore, meaningfulness of words evaluated by words’ average informativeness in the categories. We have decided to include the most informative 5,000 words in the scientific thesaurus. Words as a Vector of Frequencies in WoS CategoriesEach word of the LScDC is represented as a vector of frequencies in WoS categories. Given the collection of the LSC texts, each entry of the vector consists of the number of texts containing the word in the corresponding category.It is noteworthy that texts in a corpus do not necessarily belong to a single category, as they are likely to correspond to multidisciplinary studies, specifically in a corpus of scientific texts. In other words, categories may not be exclusive. There are 252 WoS categories and a text can be assigned to at least 1 and at most 6 categories in the LSC. Using the binary calculation of frequencies, we introduce the presence of a word in a category. We create a vector of frequencies for each word, where dimensions are categories in the corpus.The collection of vectors, with all words and categories in the entire corpus, can be shown in a table, where each entry corresponds to a pair (word,category). This table is build for the LScDC with 252 WoS categories and presented in published archive with this file. The value of each entry in the table shows how many times a word of LScDC appears in a WoS category. The occurrence of a word in a category is determined by counting the number of the LSC texts containing the word in a category. Words as a Vector of Relative Information Gains Extracted for CategoriesIn this section, we introduce our approach to representation of a word as a vector of relative information gains for categories under the assumption that meaning of a word can be quantified by their information gained for categories.For each category, a function is defined on texts that takes the value 1, if the text belongs to the category, and 0 otherwise. For each word, a function is defined on texts that takes the value 1 if the word belongs to the text, and 0 otherwise. Consider LSC as a probabilistic sample space (the space of equally probable elementary outcomes). For the Boolean random variables, the joint probability distribution, the entropy and information gains are defined.The information gain about the category from the word is the amount of information on the belonging of a text from the LSC to the category from observing the word in the text [6]. We used the Relative Information Gain (RIG) providing a normalised measure of the Information Gain. This provides the ability of comparing information gains for different categories. The calculations of entropy, Information Gains and Relative Information Gains can be found in the README file in the archive published. Given a word, we created a vector where each component of the vector corresponds to a category. Therefore, each word is represented as a vector of relative information gains. It is obvious that the dimension of vector for each word is the number of categories. The set of vectors is used to form the Word-Category RIG Matrix, in which each column corresponds to a category, each row corresponds to a word and each component is the relative information gain from the word to the category. In Word-Category RIG Matrix, a row vector represents the corresponding word as a vector of RIGs in categories. We note that in the matrix, a column vector represents RIGs of all words in an individual category. If we choose an arbitrary category, words can be ordered by their RIGs from the most informative to the least informative for the category. As well as ordering words in each category, words can be ordered by two criteria: sum and maximum of RIGs in categories. The top n words in this list can be considered as the most informative words in the scientific texts. For a given word, the sum and maximum of RIGs are calculated from the Word-Category RIG Matrix.RIGs for each word of LScDC in 252 categories are calculated and vectors of words are formed. We then form the Word-Category RIG Matrix for the LSC. For each word, the sum (S) and maximum (M) of RIGs in categories are calculated and added at the end of the matrix (last two columns of the matrix). The Word-Category RIG Matrix for the LScDC with 252 categories, the sum of RIGs in categories and the maximum of RIGs over categories can be found in the database.Leicester Scientific Thesaurus (LScT)Leicester Scientific Thesaurus (LScT) is a list of 5,000 words form the LScDC [2]. Words of LScDC are sorted in descending order by the sum (S) of RIGs in categories and the top 5,000 words are selected to be included in the LScT. We consider these 5,000 words as the most meaningful words in the scientific corpus. In other words, meaningfulness of words evaluated by words’ average informativeness in the categories and the list of these words are considered as a ‘thesaurus’ for science. The LScT with value of sum can be found as CSV file with the published archive. Published archive contains following files:1) Word_Category_RIG_Matrix.csv: A 103,998 by 254 matrix where columns are 252 WoS categories, the sum (S) and the maximum (M) of RIGs in categories (last two columns of the matrix), and rows are words of LScDC. Each entry in the first 252 columns is RIG from the word to the category. Words are ordered as in the LScDC.2) Word_Category_Frequency_Matrix.csv: A 103,998 by 252 matrix where columns are 252 WoS categories and rows are words of LScDC. Each entry of the matrix is the number of texts containing the word in the corresponding category. Words are ordered as in the LScDC.3) LScT.csv: List of words of LScT with sum (S) values. 4) Text_No_in_Cat.csv: The number of texts in categories. 5) Categories_in_Documents.csv: List of WoS categories for each document of the LSC.6) README.txt: Description of Word-Category RIG Matrix, Word-Category Frequency Matrix and LScT and forming procedures.7) README.pdf (same as 6 in PDF format)References[1] Suzen, Neslihan (2019): LSC (Leicester Scientific Corpus). figshare. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.25392/leicester.data.9449639.v2[2] Suzen, Neslihan (2019): LScDC (Leicester Scientific Dictionary-Core). figshare. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.25392/leicester.data.9896579.v3[3] Web of Science. (15 July). Available: https://apps.webofknowledge.com/[4] WoS Subject Categories. Available: https://images.webofknowledge.com/WOKRS56B5/help/WOS/hp_subject_category_terms_tasca.html [5] Suzen, N., Mirkes, E. M., & Gorban, A. N. (2019). LScDC-new large scientific dictionary. arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.06858. [6] Shannon, C. E. (1948). A mathematical theory of communication. Bell system technical journal, 27(3), 379-423.

Abstract The objective of this work is to improve the quality of the information that belongs to the database CubaCiencia, of the Institute of Scientific and Technological Information. This database has bibliographic information referring to four segments of science and is the main database of the Library Management System. The applied methodology was based on the Decision Trees, the Correlation Matrix, the 3D Scatter Plot, etc., which are techniques used by data mining, for the study of large volumes of information. The results achieved not only made it possible to improve the information in the database, but also provided truly useful patterns in the solution of the proposed objectives.

Data Analysis is the process that supports decision-making and informs arguments in empirical studies. Descriptive statistics, Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA), and Confirmatory Data Analysis (CDA) are the approaches that compose Data Analysis (Xia & Gong; 2014). An Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) comprises a set of statistical and data mining procedures to describe data. We ran EDA to provide statistical facts and inform conclusions. The mined facts allow attaining arguments that would influence the Systematic Literature Review of DL4SE.

The Systematic Literature Review of DL4SE requires formal statistical modeling to refine the answers for the proposed research questions and formulate new hypotheses to be addressed in the future. Hence, we introduce DL4SE-DA, a set of statistical processes and data mining pipelines that uncover hidden relationships among Deep Learning reported literature in Software Engineering. Such hidden relationships are collected and analyzed to illustrate the state-of-the-art of DL techniques employed in the software engineering context.

Our DL4SE-DA is a simplified version of the classical Knowledge Discovery in Databases, or KDD (Fayyad, et al; 1996). The KDD process extracts knowledge from a DL4SE structured database. This structured database was the product of multiple iterations of data gathering and collection from the inspected literature. The KDD involves five stages:

Selection. This stage was led by the taxonomy process explained in section xx of the paper. After collecting all the papers and creating the taxonomies, we organize the data into 35 features or attributes that you find in the repository. In fact, we manually engineered features from the DL4SE papers. Some of the features are venue, year published, type of paper, metrics, data-scale, type of tuning, learning algorithm, SE data, and so on.

Preprocessing. The preprocessing applied was transforming the features into the correct type (nominal), removing outliers (papers that do not belong to the DL4SE), and re-inspecting the papers to extract missing information produced by the normalization process. For instance, we normalize the feature “metrics” into “MRR”, “ROC or AUC”, “BLEU Score”, “Accuracy”, “Precision”, “Recall”, “F1 Measure”, and “Other Metrics”. “Other Metrics” refers to unconventional metrics found during the extraction. Similarly, the same normalization was applied to other features like “SE Data” and “Reproducibility Types”. This separation into more detailed classes contributes to a better understanding and classification of the paper by the data mining tasks or methods.

Transformation. In this stage, we omitted to use any data transformation method except for the clustering analysis. We performed a Principal Component Analysis to reduce 35 features into 2 components for visualization purposes. Furthermore, PCA also allowed us to identify the number of clusters that exhibit the maximum reduction in variance. In other words, it helped us to identify the number of clusters to be used when tuning the explainable models.

Data Mining. In this stage, we used three distinct data mining tasks: Correlation Analysis, Association Rule Learning, and Clustering. We decided that the goal of the KDD process should be oriented to uncover hidden relationships on the extracted features (Correlations and Association Rules) and to categorize the DL4SE papers for a better segmentation of the state-of-the-art (Clustering). A clear explanation is provided in the subsection “Data Mining Tasks for the SLR od DL4SE”. 5.Interpretation/Evaluation. We used the Knowledge Discover to automatically find patterns in our papers that resemble “actionable knowledge”. This actionable knowledge was generated by conducting a reasoning process on the data mining outcomes. This reasoning process produces an argument support analysis (see this link).

We used RapidMiner as our software tool to conduct the data analysis. The procedures and pipelines were published in our repository.

Overview of the most meaningful Association Rules. Rectangles are both Premises and Conclusions. An arrow connecting a Premise with a Conclusion implies that given some premise, the conclusion is associated. E.g., Given that an author used Supervised Learning, we can conclude that their approach is irreproducible with a certain Support and Confidence.

Support = Number of occurrences this statement is true divided by the amount of statements Confidence = The support of the statement divided by the number of occurrences of the premise

Yearly citation counts for the publication titled "An improvement of a data mining technique for early detection of at-risk learners in distance learning environments".

Activity Title: "Data Detective: The Warehouse Mystery!"

(This file contains eight different datasets to practice data mining and data warehousing techniques. And this activity is curated for Data Science beginners.)

Description: Divide students into groups and assign each a "mini-warehouse" (a pre-created, structured dataset with hidden patterns or trends).

Each group acts as data detectives tasked with discovering: • Frequent patterns (association rules) • Anomalies (outliers) • Summaries (clustering or classification)

Outcome: Present findings as visual dashboards or data storytelling reports.

DATA MINING THE GALAXY ZOO MERGERS STEVEN BAEHR, ARUN VEDACHALAM, KIRK BORNE, AND DANIEL SPONSELLER Abstract. Collisions between pairs of galaxies usually end in the coalescence (merger) of the two galaxies. Collisions and mergers are rare phenomena, yet they may signal the ultimate fate of most galaxies, including our own Milky Way. With the onset of massive collection of astronomical data, a computerized and automated method will be necessary for identifying those colliding galaxies worthy of more detailed study. This project researches methods to accomplish that goal. Astronomical data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and human-provided classifications on merger status from the Galaxy Zoo project are combined and processed with machine learning algorithms. The goal is to determine indicators of merger status based solely on discovering those automated pipeline-generated attributes in the astronomical database that correlate most strongly with the patterns identified through visual inspection by the Galaxy Zoo volunteers. In the end, we aim to provide a new and improved automated procedure for classification of collisions and mergers in future petascale astronomical sky surveys. Both information gain analysis (via the C4.5 decision tree algorithm) and cluster analysis (via the Davies-Bouldin Index) are explored as techniques for finding the strongest correlations between human-identified patterns and existing database attributes. Galaxy attributes measured in the SDSS green waveband images are found to represent the most influential of the attributes for correct classification of collisions and mergers. Only a nominal information gain is noted in this research, however, there is a clear indication of which attributes contribute so that a direction for further study is apparent.