Data mining and machine learning in textile industry

Data mining has been proven useful for knowledge discovery in many areas, ranging from marketing to medical and from banking to education. This study focuses on data mining and machine learning in textile industry as applying them to textile data is considered an emerging interdisciplinary research field. Thus, data mining studies, including classification and clustering techniques and machine learning algorithms, implemented in textile industry were presented and explained in detail in this study to provide an overview of how clustering and classification techniques can be applied in the textile industry to deal with different problems where traditional methods are not useful. This article clearly shows that a classification technique has higher interest than a clustering technique in the textile industry. It also shows that the most commonly applied classification methods are artificial neural networks and support vector machines, and they generally provide high accuracy rates in the textile applications. For the clustering task of data mining, a K-means algorithm was generally implemented in textile studies among the others that were investigated in this article. We conclude with some remarks on the strength of the data mining techniques for textile industry, ways to overcome certain challenges, and offer some possible further research directions. (C) 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc