Data mining in military systems

Abstract

The discovery of knowledge in databases has gained great importance and interest in recent years, especially in strategical areas where the access to the information is restricted many times. There has been a substantial growth in the amount of stored information in digital media, mainly due to its increasing easiness and cost reduction. However, the large amount of stored data becomes impracticable for specialists to analyze through conventional methods. The difficulty for a more accurate analysis of these data means they may become accumulated useless information. On the other hand, it is known that in large amounts of data an enormous potential of extractable information can exist. This work presents the application of a data mining tool in military databases. A case study is shown where the mining of rules of association and classification capable of finding useful information for the improvement of an anti-missile system in ships was carried out. The results show that the methodology reached its main objectives, that is, rules were generated from large databases. However, it is important to remember that the generation of these rules represents only the initial stage of the system improvement with the use of data mining.