Better Business Decisions from Data

CHAPTER 22

Data Mining

Twenty-First-Century Gold Rush

Data mining is a means of producing predictive information from large amounts of data. It is one of the fastest growing methods of forecasting in the business world and is exciting in the prospects it offers for the future.

The Growth of Data

Storage of large amounts of data is not new: libraries have existed since ancient times. More recently, companies have kept details of suppliers, customers, and staff. Records of business transactions, of purchases and sales, of expenses and profits, and so on, were stored initially in books and files. Later, electronic storage on databases gave considerable savings in effort and space. Such data have traditionally been used to provide information regarding ...