Data Mining
Data
mining, the extraction of hidden predictive information from large databases,
is a powerful new technology with great potential to help companies focus on
the most important information in their data warehouses. Data mining tools
predict future trends and behaviors, allowing businesses to make proactive,
knowledge-driven decisions. The automated, prospective analyses offered by data
mining move beyond the analyses of past events provided by retrospective tools
typical of decision support systems. Data mining tools can answer business
questions that traditionally were too time consuming to resolve. They scour
databases for hidden patterns, finding predictive information that experts may
miss because it lies outside their expectations.
Most
companies already collect and refine massive quantities of data. Data mining
techniques can be implemented rapidly on existing software and hardware
platforms to enhance the value of existing information resources, and can be
integrated with new products and systems as they are brought on-line. This
white paper provides an introduction to the basic technologies of data mining.
Examples of profitable applications illustrate its relevance to today‘s
business environment as well as a basic description of how data warehouse
architectures can evolve to deliver the value of data mining to end users.
1 The Foundations of Data Mining
Data
mining techniques are the result of a long process of research and product
development. This evolution began when business data was first stored on
computers, continued with improvements in data access, and more recently,
generated technologies that allow users to navigate through their data in real
time.
Data
mining takes this evolutionary process beyond retrospective data access and
navigation to prospective and proactive information delivery. Data mining is
ready for application in the business community because it is supported by
three technologies that are now sufficiently mature:
Massive
data collection
Powerful
multiprocessor computers
Data
mining algorithms
Commercial
databases are growing at unprecedented rates. A recent META Group survey of
data warehouse projects found that 19% of respondents are beyond the 50
gigabyte level, while 59% expect to be there by second quarter of 1996.In some
industries, such as retail, these numbers can be much larger.
The
accompanying need for improved computational engines can now be met in a
cost-effective manner with parallel multiprocessor computer technology. Data
mining algorithms embody techniques that have existed for at least 10 years,
but have only recently been implemented as mature, reliable, understandable
tools that consistently outperform older statistical methods.
In the
evolution from business data to business information, each new step has built
upon the previous one. For example, dynamic data access is critical for
drill-through in data navigation applications, and the ability to store large
databases is critical to data mining. From the user‘s point of view, the four
steps listed in Table 1 were revolutionary because they allowed new business
questions to be answered accurately and quickly.
Table 1.
Steps in the Evolution of Data Mining.
The core
components of data mining technology have been under development for decades,
in research areas such as statistics, artificial intelligence, and machine
learning. Today, the maturity of these techniques, coupled with
high-performance relational database engines and broad data integration
efforts, make these technologies practical for current data warehouse
environments.
2 The Scope of Data Mining
Data
mining derives its name from the similarities between searching for valuable
business information in a large database for example, finding linked products
in gigabytes of store scanner data and mining a mountain for a vein of valuable
ore. Both processes require either sifting through an immense amount of
material, or intelligently probing it to find exactly where the value resides.
Given databases of sufficient size and quality, data mining technology can
generate new business opportunities by providing these capabilities:
Automated
prediction of trends and behaviors. Data mining automates the process of
finding predictive information in large databases. Questions that traditionally
required extensive hands-on analysis can now be answered directly from the data
quickly. A typical example of a predictive problem is targeted marketing. Data
mining uses data on past promotional mailings to identify the targets most
likely to maximize return on investment in future mailings. Other predictive
problems include forecasting bankruptcy and other forms of default, and
identifying segments of a population likely to respond similarly to given
events.
Automated
discovery of previously unknown patterns. Data mining tools sweep through
databases and identify previously hidden patterns in one step. An example of
pattern discovery is the analysis of retail sales data to identify seemingly
unrelated products that are often purchased together. Other pattern discovery
problems include detecting fraudulent credit card transactions and identifying
anomalous data that could represent data entry keying errors.
Data
mining techniques can yield the benefits of automation on existing software and
hardware platforms, and can be implemented on new systems as existing platforms
are upgraded and new products developed. When data mining tools are implemented
on high performance parallel processing systems, they can analyze massive
databases in minutes. Faster processing means that users can automatically
experiment with more models to understand complex data. High speed makes it
practical for users to analyze huge quantities of data. Larger databases, in
turn, yield improved predictions.
3 Databases can be larger in both depth and breadth
More
columns. Analysts must often limit the number of variables they examine when
doing hands-on analysis due to time constraints. Yet variables that are
discarded because they seem unimportant may carry information about unknown
patterns. High performance data mining allows users to explore the full depth
of a database, without preselecting a subset of variables.
More
rows. Larger samples yield lower estimation errors and variance, and allow
users to make inferences about small but important segments of a population.
A recent
Gartner Group Advanced Technology Research Note listed data mining and
artificial intelligence at the top of the five key technology areas that
"will clearly have a major impact across a wide range of industries within
the next 3 to 5 years."Gartner also listed parallel architectures and data
mining as two of the top 10 new technologies in which companies will invest
during the next 5 years. According to a recent Gartner HPC Research Note,
"With the rapid advance in data capture, transmission and storage,
large-systems users will increasingly need to implement new and innovative ways
to mine the after-market value of their vast stores of detail data, employing
MPP [massively parallel processing] systems to create new sources of business
advantage (0.9 probability)."
4 Techniques in data mining
Artificial
neural networks: Non-linear predictive models that learn through training and
resemble biological neural networks in structure.
Decision
trees: Tree-shaped structures that represent sets of decisions. These decisions
generate rules for the classification of a dataset. Specific decision tree
methods include Classification and Regression Trees (CART) and Chi Square
Automatic Interaction Detection (CHAID).
Genetic
algorithms: Optimization techniques that use process such as genetic
combination, mutation, and natural selection in a design based on the concepts
of evolution.
Nearest
neighbor method: A technique that classifies each record in a dataset based on
a combination of the classes of the k record(s) most similar to it in a
historical dataset. Sometimes called the k-nearest neighbor technique.
Rule
induction: The extraction of useful if-then rules from data based on
statistical significance.
Many of
these technologies have been in use for more than a decade in specialized
analysis tools that work with relatively small volumes of data. These
capabilities are now evolving to integrate directly with industry-standard data
warehouse and OLAP platforms. The appendix to this white paper provides a
glossary of data mining terms.
5 How Data Mining Works
How
exactly is data mining able to tell you important things that you didn't know
or what is going to happen next? The technique that is used to perform these
feats in data mining is called modeling. Modeling is simply the act of building
a model in one situation where you know the answer and then applying it to
another situation that you don't. For instance, if you were looking for a
sunken Spanish galleon on the high seas the first thing you might do is to
research the times when Spanish treasure had been found by others in the past.
You might note that these ships often tend to be found off the coast of Bermuda
and that there are certain characteristics to the ocean currents, and certain
routes that have likely been taken by the ship‘s captains in that era. You note
these similarities and build a model that includes the characteristics that are
common to the locations of these sunken treasures. With these models in hand
you sail off looking for treasure where your model indicates it most likely
might be given a similar situation in the past. Hopefully, if you've got a good
model, you find your treasure.
This act
of model building is thus something that people have been doing for a long
time, certainly before the advent of computers or data mining technology. What
happens on computers, however, is not much different than the way people build
models. Computers are loaded up with lots of information about a variety of
situations where an answer is known and then the data mining software on the
computer must run through that data and distill the characteristics of the data
that should go into the model. Once the model is built it can then be used in
similar situations where you don't know the answer. For example, say that you
are the director of marketing for a telecommunications company and you'd like
to acquire some new long distance phone customers. You could just randomly go
out and mail coupons to the general population - just as you could randomly
sail the seas looking for sunken treasure. In neither case would you achieve
the results you desired and of course you have the opportunity to do much
better than random - you could use your business experience stored in your
database to build a model.
As the
marketing director you have access to a lot of information about all of your
customers: their age, sex, credit history and long distance calling usage. The
good news is that you also have a lot of information about your prospective
customers: their age, sex, credit history etc. Your problem is that you don't
know the long distance calling usage of these prospects (since they are most
likely now customers of your competition). You'd like to concentrate on those
prospects that have large amounts of long distance usage. You can accomplish
this by building a model. Table 2 illustrates the data used for building a
model for new customer prospecting in a data warehouse.
Table 2 -
Data Mining for Prospecting
The goal
in prospecting is to make some calculated guesses about the information in the
lower right hand quadrant based on the model that we build going from Customer
General Information to Customer Proprietary Information. For instance, a simple
model for a telecommunications company might be:
98% of my
customers who make more than $60,000/year spend more than $80/month on long
distance. This model could then be applied to the prospect data to try to tell
something about the proprietary information that this telecommunications
company does not currently have access to. With this model in hand new customers
can be selectively targeted.
Test
marketing is an excellent source of data for this kind of modeling. Mining the
results of a test market representing a broad but relatively small sample of
prospects can provide a foundation for identifying good prospects in the
overall market. Table 3 shows another common scenario for building models:
predict what is going to happen in the future.
Table 3 -
Data Mining for Predictions
If
someone told you that he had a model that could predict customer usage how
would you know if he really had a good model? The first thing you might try
would be to ask him to apply his model to your customer base - where you
already knew the answer. With data mining, the best way to accomplish this is
by setting aside some of your data in a vault to isolate it from the mining
process. Once the mining is complete, the results can be tested against the
data held in the vault to confirm the model‘s validity. If the model works, its
observations should hold for the vaulted data.
6 Architecture for Data Mining
To best
apply these advanced techniques, they must be fully integrated with a data
warehouse as well as flexible interactive business analysis tools. Many data
mining tools currently operate outside of the warehouse, requiring extra steps
for extracting, importing, and analyzing the data. Furthermore, when new
insights require operational implementation, integration with the warehouse
simplifies the application of results from data mining. The resulting analytic
data warehouse can be applied to improve business processes throughout the
organization, in areas such as promotional campaign management, fraud
detection, new product rollout, and so on. Figure illustrates architecture for
advanced analysis in a large data warehouse.
The ideal
starting point is a data warehouse containing a combination of internal data
tracking all customer contact coupled with external market data about
competitor activity. Background information on potential customers also
provides an excellent basis for prospecting. This warehouse can be implemented
in a variety of relational database systems: Sybase, Oracle, Redbrick, and so
on, and should be optimized for flexible and fast data access.
An OLAP (On-Line
Analytical Processing) server enables a more sophisticated end-user business
model to be applied when navigating the data warehouse. The multidimensional
structures allow the user to analyze the data as they want to view their
business – summarizing by product line, region, and other key perspectives of
their business. The Data Mining Server must be integrated with the data
warehouse and the OLAP server to embed ROI-focused business analysis directly
into this infrastructure. An advanced, process-centric metadata template
defines the data mining objectives for specific business issues like campaign
management, prospecting, and promotion optimization. Integration with the data
warehouse enables operational decisions to be directly implemented and tracked.
As the warehouse grows with new decisions and results, the organization can
continually mine the best practices and apply them to future decisions.
This
design represents a fundamental shift from conventional decision support
systems. Rather than simply delivering data to the end user through query and
reporting software, the Advanced Analysis Server applies users‘ business models
directly to the warehouse and returns a proactive analysis of the most relevant
information. These results enhance the metadata in the OLAP Server by providing
a dynamic metadata layer that represents a distilled view of the data.
Reporting, visualization, and other analysis tools can then be applied to plan
future actions and confirm the impact of those plans.
7 Application
A
pharmaceutical company can analyze its recent sales force activity and their
results to improve targeting of high-value physicians and determine which
marketing activities will have the greatest impact in the next few months. The
data needs to include competitor market activity as well as information about
the local health care systems. The results can be distributed to the sales
force via a wide-area network that enables the representatives to review the
recommendations from the perspective of the key attributes in the decision
process. The ongoing, dynamic analysis of the data warehouse allows best
practices from throughout the organization to be applied in specific sales
situations.
A credit
card company can leverage its vast warehouse of customer transaction data to
identify customers most likely to be interested in a new credit product. Using
a small test mailing, the attributes of customers with an affinity for the
product can be identified. Recent projects have indicated more than a 20-fold
decrease in costs for targeted mailing campaigns over conventional approaches.
A
diversified transportation company with a large direct sales force can apply
data mining to identify the best prospects for its services. Using data mining
to analyze its own customer experience, this company can build a unique
segmentation identifying the attributes of high-value prospects. Applying this
segmentation to a general business database such as those provided by Dun &
Bradstreet can yield a prioritized list of prospects by region.
A large
consumer package goods company can apply data mining to improve its sales
process to retailers. Data from consumer panels, shipments, and competitor
activity can be applied to understand the reasons for brand and store
switching. Through this analysis, the manufacturer can select promotional
strategies that best reach their target customer segments.
Comprehensive
data warehouses that integrate operational data with customer, supplier, and
market information have resulted in an explosion of information. Competition
requires timely and sophisticated analysis on an integrated view of the data.
However, there is a growing gap between more powerful storage and retrieval
systems and the users‘ ability to effectively analyze and act on the information
they contain. Both relational and OLAP technologies have tremendous
capabilities for navigating massive data warehouses, but brute force navigation
of data is not enough. A new technological leap is needed to structure and
prioritize information for specific end-user problems. The data mining tools
can make this leap. Quantifiable business benefits have been proven through the
integration of data mining with current information systems, and new products
are on the horizon that will bring this integration to an even wider audience
of users.
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