Review of data, text and web mining software

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to review and compare selected software for data mining, text mining (TM), and web mining that are not available as free open‐source software.Design/methodology/approachSelected softwares are compared with their common and unique features. The software for data mining are SAS® Enterprise Miner™, Megaputer PolyAnalyst® 5.0, NeuralWare Predict®, and BioDiscovery GeneSight®. The software for TM are CompareSuite, SAS® Text Miner, TextAnalyst, VisualText, Megaputer PolyAnalyst® 5.0, and WordStat. The software for web mining are Megaputer PolyAnalyst®, SPSS Clementine®, ClickTracks, and QL2.FindingsThis paper discusses and compares the existing features, characteristics, and algorithms of selected software for data mining, TM, and web mining, respectively. These softwares are also applied to available data sets.Research limitations/implicationsThe limitations are the inclusion of selected software and datasets rather than considering the entire realm of these. This review could be used as a framework for comparing other data, text, and web mining software.Practical implicationsThis paper can be helpful for an organization or individual when choosing proper software to meet their mining needs.Originality/valueEach of the software selected for this research has its own unique characteristics, properties, and algorithms. No other paper compares these selected softwares both visually and descriptively for all the three types of data, text, and web mining.