Census Data Mining – An Application

Because of data privacy regulations, census data are available for analysis only in aggregated form. Primary data (responses of persons) are aggregated in many cross tabulations for small geographical units. Thus the target objects of secondary analysis are small areas (enumeration districts or wards ). Any cell or marginal of a cross tabulation can be used as variable on these target objects. The target objects can be linked with other spatial objects (e.g. rivers, roads, railway lines) for spatial analyses. In this paper we discuss the special requirements that occur for this type of aggregate data mining including spatial analyses. We show an application of SubgroupMiner, which is an advanced subgroup mining system supporting multirelational hypotheses, efficient data base integration, discovery of causal subgroup structures, and visualization based interaction options.