Customer Reviews

Data Mining Explained: A Manager's Guide to Customer-Centric Business Intelligence

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This book contains descriptions of the most common data mining techniques and examples of how they can be applied in different industries with real case studies.

It's a good book if you want to have an overview of data mining and get some ideas about how to use it and it covers a quite a broad perspective and is very much uptodate. I would maybe have prefered a book which was more like a reference guide for practical every-day-use.

Much data mining literature is aimed either at marketers who do not even aspire to understand what the technology does, or technical practitioners who have graduate-level knowledge of math, computer science, and statistics. Data Mining Explained manages to straddle this fence, combining the quick-and-easy readability of a business book with the practical implications of a technical tome.

Readers of this book will learn what questions data mining can answer, what analytical techniques it can entail, how data mining projects can be managed, and how data mining has been used successfully in various industries. There are no complicated equations, but high-level algorithmic concepts like the difference between top-down and bottom-up clustering are thoroughly explained. The management advice includes a general project methodology and is augmented by the illustration of a typical project plan (in which it's interesting to note that <40% is spent on model prototyping, evaluation and implementation). There is also specific advice for handling typical issues like missing or bad data, intercorrelated features, and small target populations.

By far the most useful sections are Chapters 8-10 on Data Mining Techniques (divided into "Knowledge Discovery" and "Predictive Models") and Chapters 11-13 on Data Mining Management (divided into "Avoiding Pitfalls," "Overcoming Obstacles," and "Managing Projects to Success"). (Skip the case studies at the end. They're too general to be useful.)

One small drawback: the book has several obvious annotation errors and some evidence of discontinuity from cut-and-paste reorganization. My library book had some pencil edits and index corrections made by previous readers, and I added some of my own. But this is a small nuisance within a generally positive reading experience.