Customer Reviews

Data Mining: Building Competitive Advantage

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book doesn't have the depth of Ian Witten's "Data Mining", yet it is an excellent book on its own. Concrete examples, hands-on training with included software, a primer on Data Warehousing and clear explanations makes it unique among so many other data mining books.

Pretty basic stuff. If you do not know anything about databases and have never conducted any analysis buy this book. Otherwise do not bother. I was a little disappointed that it did not provide more detail on many of the algorithms - rather it just pointed out different things that data mining can do (though very well explained). While it providing a nice overview, it did not really strike me as anything groundshaking. It does, however, have has a nice listing of vendors. I would refer to the Berry and Linoff book "Mastering Data Mining" for a slightly more thorough treatment.

If you are a business student willing to understand the magic behind the mysterious words like Data Mining, Data Warehousing and Neural Networks, this book is for you. It is practical, and it explains how business can benefit from knowledge it extracts from data. Data sets for the book examples are available on the CD, so a reader can tangibly apply the methods described and get a valuable hands-on experience of data analysis.

I browsed several books on data mining before deciding on this one. If you are looking for an introduction to data mining, this book does an excellent job.