Data Mining For Dummies

Introduction

Data mining is the way that businesspeople can explore data independently, make informative discoveries, and put that information to work in everyday business. You don’t need to be an expert in statistics, a scientist, or a computer programmer to be a data miner. You don’t need mountains of data or special computers to do data mining.

This book is written for people who know much more about their own business than about math. It’s for people who have ordinary computers, the same ones they use every day for word processing and spreadsheet juggling. The most important thing is that this book is for people who have real business problems to solve, and are motivated to use data to help solve those problems.

About This Book

This is a guidebook for people who have heard a little about data mining and want to give it a try. It contains all the information you need to get started as a hands-on data miner. If you don’t want to become a data miner yourself, but do want to know what data mining is all about, this book will work for you, too. And although the book was aimed for beginners, data miners with some experience may flip through and find a few fresh pointers, too.

If you try out all (okay, most) of the methods in this book, use them to investigate your own data, and solve a business problem of your own, you’ll become a data miner.

Read on, and you will discover the following:

• How data miners work, and the principles and processes of data mining
• Why teaming with other ...