So, What Exactly Is Data Mining?
Data mining basically involves huge volumes of data being sifted through by data mining software in order to search for patterns in the data. Data mining, which is a type of artificial intelligence, has been used primarily to analyze scientific and business data. Data mining has also been used to voting trends and patterns in political campaigns.
Data basically comprises of numerical or some other factual information that is collected in order to be analyzed. Examples of data are sale totals, names, places, and phone numbers. For instance, when you go to purchase something from a shop and you are asked to give your zip code or telephone number by the sales person at the checkout, essentially that is an exercise in collecting data, which will be used to analyze buying patterns, like how many other people from your area purchased the same product. Data mining helps to determine these patterns and allows businesses to predict in what manner buyers in a particular area will behave in the future.
Data Mining Helps To Improve Decision Making
Thus, data mining uses predictive techniques to reveal patterns in the data. These patterns have a vital role in the process of decision making since they expose the areas where improvements can be made in the process. Organizations can use data mining in such a way as to improve profitableness and effectiveness of their interactions with their customers, improve the management of risk, and detect fraud. In other words, the patterns that are revealed by using data mining assist business organizations make timelier and better decisions.
Data Mining Techniques
Here is a brief account of two of the most popular data mining techniques: Regression and Classification.
Regression: This is the most widely known and the oldest statistical technique that is utilized by the data mining community. Essentially, regression makes use of a dataset to develop a mathematical formula which fits the data. So whenever you want to use the results for predicting future behavioral patterns, all you need to do is just take the new data, and apply it to the formula that has been developed, and you will get your prediction. The greatest limiting factor of this technique is that it works well with only quantitative data that is continuous, such as age, speed, or weight. But if you need to work with data that is categorical, where there is no significant order, such as gender, name, or color, it is better to use a different technique.
Classification: If you need to work with categorical data, or a combination of categorical data and continuous numeric, classification analysis will meet your requirements. This technique has the capability to process a more extensive variety of data compared to regression and is therefore increasing in popularity. In addition, the output it provides can be interpreted more easily. Rather than the complex mathematical formula that the regression technique provides, in this you will be provided a decision tree which requires a sequence of binary decisions.
Data Mining Applications and Data Mining Tools
Data mining software is usually divided into two groups by most analysts: data mining applications and data mining tools. While data mining applications implant techniques within an application that is customized to deal with a particular business problem, data mining tools, on the other hand, provide several techniques that can be utilized for any business problem.
Irrespective of whether we are cognizant of it or not, our everyday lives are touched by data mining applications. For instance, practically every monetary transaction we make is processed via a data mining application in order to detect fraudulence. However, both data mining applications and data mining tools are valuable. Organizations are increasingly using both data mining applications and data mining tools in an integrated manner to carry out predictive analysis.
So, How Do Data Mining Tools and Data Mining Applications Work Together?
Data mining tools are utilized to ensure the highest level of accuracy possible as well as flexibility. Basically, the effectiveness of data mining applications is increased via data mining tools. Because no two sets of data or organizations can ever be completely alike, there cannot be a single technique that can provide the best results for everybody. Apart from data mining tools providing in-depth techniques, but they also offer the flexibility to use any combination of the techniques in order to improve the accuracy of predictions. Because of the flexibility of data mining tools, a data mining methodology and a set of guidelines for data mining have been devised in order to help in guiding the process. The CRISP-DM, or the Cross-Industry Standard Process for Data Mining ensures that your business’s results with data mining tools are reliable and timely. This methodology was devised in conjunction with vendors and practitioners in order to provide data mining practitioners with guidelines, checklists, objectives, and tasks for each stage of the process of data mining.