A comprehensive comparison study on the datamining based approaches for detecting islanding events in a power distribution system with inverter-based distributed generations is presented. The important features for each phase in the island detection scheme are investigated in detail. These features are extracted from the time-varying measurements of voltage, frequency and total harmonic distortion (THD) of current and voltage at the point of common coupling. Numerical studies were conducted on the IEEE 34-bus system considering various scenarios of islanding and non-islanding conditions. The features obtained are then used to train several data mining techniques such as decision tree, support vector machine, neural network, bagging and rand...