Predictive Data Mining: A Practical Guide

The potential business advantages of data mining are well documented in publications for executives and managers. However, developers implementing major data-mining systems need concrete information about the underlying technical principles and their practical manifestations in order to either integrate commercially available tools or write data-mining programs from scratch. This book is the first technical guide to provide a complete, generalized roadmap for developing data-mining applications, together with advice on performing these large-scale, open-ended analyses for real-world data warehouses. Focuses on the preparation and organization of data and the development of an overall strategy for data mining. Reviews sophisticated prediction methods that search for patterns in big data. Describes how to accurately estimate future performance of proposed solutions. Illustrates the data-mining process and its potential pitfalls through real-life case studies.