Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Webcasts on data mining

Moshe Cohen, a current MBA student in my class, pointed out an interesting set of webcasts on data mining called "Best Practices in Data Mining", by the Insightful corporation. Part I (now archived) describes a few scenarios where data mining is useful in the business context. They show some examples of questions of interest, datasets that are used in such applications, and the analysis process. Of course, their software InsightfulMiner is also showcased. I especially liked the emphasis on data visualization, and the SAS-EM-like "working" chart. They also discuss data preprocessing with some detail on missing values and outliers. Further topics include a bit on clustering, classification trees, and some evaluation methods.

Part II, upcoming on Nov 16, is supposed to cover additional topics. Here is the official description:
Part 2 of the series will explore further data modeling methods such as
survival methods. In addition we will discuss how the results of data
mining can be leveraged to understand underlying customer behavior, for
example. Such knowledge is then valuable in choosing appropriate business
actions, such as designing an optimal marketing campaign.

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