Customer Reviews

Data Mining With Neural Networks: Solving Business Problems from Application Development to Decision Support

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The cover of this book clearly states that it is intended for "Solving Business Problems - from Application Development to Decision Support". The back of the book states that it is a "practical, accessible guide for business executives..."

This is not a book for developers unless they are just getting started and have never heard of neural nets or data mining. I found this little book helpful for providing easy-to-understand reviews for beginning AI students and non-technical business people.

Some of the other reviewers of this book are unfairly slamming this book for not being technical enough, when clearly that is not the intention of the book. There are no formulae in this book, but there are some nice diagrams that get the point across for beginners. The chapter on agents seemed a little misplaced, but otherwise, for learning about neural nets, this is not a bad book. For a pure biz-oriented "intro to data mining" I prefer the Adriaans book, however.

The Amazon.com review of this book (see above) says "are you personally more interested in strategic applications and general overviews than mind-numbing equations and printouts of code?". A good general overview does not have to contain printouts of code and mind-numbing equations, but it does have more substance and conceptual information than this "business week" like book long article. That's the point. The contents of this book would be fine for a business magazine article but not for a book. Too much prose and at the end not even an intelligent reader can make sense of what is really feasible with this technology and how it can be approached. There are much better general data mining books in the market, books without codes and weird equations for the mathematical illiterate, but with strong conceptual explanations and fundations. See, for instance, "Data Mining" by Pieter Adriaans for a much better book.

If you do not like math and would like to know about neural networks, then this is it. The book is very explanatory, it is designed for starters and you get a very good feeling about what neural networks are and how they work. Do not expect, however, that you will be able to design one after reading the book.

This is one of the worst books on data mining available. It is not intended for marketers nor researchers. You don't need any knowledge about neural networks and -even worse- you will not learn anything. It only talks about the IBM Neural Network Utility. If you are a business man look for 'Data Mining Techniques' from Michael J. A. Berry If you are a math man looking for a good text on neural networks see 'Neural Networks' from Simon Haykin.