Designing a Data Warehouse: Supporting Customer Relationship Management

DATA MINING

Data mining has a kind of magical reputation. Simply by pointing a data mining tool at a database reveals intriguing and unlikely patterns of behavior. There is folklore building up regarding the serendipitous nature of data mining. The reality is that, while data mining can indeed uncover hitherto unknown relationships in the data, there is nothing serendipitous about it at all. It is a systematic, interactive, and iterative process. For its success it relies on the business expertise of those interpreting the results of its analysis. An apparently useless pattern in the data can be transformed into valuable information if the right business interpretation can be applied. Conversely, a seemingly significant relationship can be explained ...