Data Mining For Dummies

Learn to:

• Understand key data mining concepts and best practices
• Create a data model and test its validity
• Interpret results and communicate your findings
• Make a business case for investing in data mining

Delve into your data for the key to success

This friendly guide shows you why it doesn’t take a data scientist to reap the benefits of exploring data independently, making informative discoveries, and putting the information to work. Written for those who know more about their business than math, this resource quickly gets you up-to-speed on how data mining can push your company to the top.

• Learn the laws of data mining — get a grip on the principles of data mining, find out how to make data your informant, and set your data mining goals
• A day in the life of a data miner — get to know the members of a typical data mining team, leverage your colleagues’ complementary skills and knowledge, and frame your work with a standard industry practice
• Define and refine — establish a framework for data mining, drill into the CRISP-DM process, and establish good habits
• Make a career in modeling — discover why modeling is the data miner’s path to knowing the unknown
• Dig into your data — draw on the knowledge that you and other members of your team have accumulated from experience and training to extract useful information from data

Open the book and find:

• Common-sense steps for data mining success
• Guidance on letting your business needs direct your software selection process
• Ways to unearth data you already have
• How to conduct experiments—no lab coat required
• Public sources for data
• Guidance on buying data and searching for suppliers
• Plain-English explanations of correlation
• The most common nonlinear models

Data mining is quickly becoming integral to creating value and business momentum. The ability to detect unseen patterns hidden in the numbers exhaustively generated by day-to-day operations allows savvy decision-makers to exploit every tool at their disposal in the pursuit of better business. By creating models and testing whether patterns hold up, it is possible to discover new intelligence that could change your business's entire paradigm for a more successful outcome.

Data Mining for Dummies shows you why it doesn't take a data scientist to gain this advantage, and empowers average business people to start shaping a process relevant to their business's needs. In this book, you'll learn the hows and whys of mining to the depths of your data, and how to make the case for heavier investment into data mining capabilities. The book explains the details of the knowledge discovery process including:

• Model creation, validity testing, and interpretation
• Effective communication of findings
• Available tools, both paid and open-source
• Data selection, transformation, and evaluation

Data Mining for Dummies takes you step-by-step through a real-world data-mining project using open-source tools that allow you to get immediate hands-on experience working with large amounts of data. You'll gain the confidence you need to start making data mining practices a routine part of your successful business. If you're serious about doing everything you can to push your company to the top, Data Mining for Dummies is your ticket to effective data mining.