Data Mining For Dummies

Chapter 2

A Day in Your Life as a Data Miner

In This Chapter

Participating in a data-mining team

Focusing on a business goal

Framing your work with an industry-standard process

Comparing data with expectations

Good morning! Welcome to an ordinary day in your data-mining career.

Today, you will meet with other members of the data-mining team to discuss a project that is already under way. A subject matter expert will help you understand the project’s business goals, and explain why they are important to your organization, to make sure that everyone is working toward the same end. Another member of the team has already begun gathering data and preparing it for exploration and modeling. (You’re lucky to have a strong team!)

After the meeting, you’ll begin working with the data hands-on. You’ll get familiar with the data. Although some of the data preparation work has been done, you will still have more data preparation to do before you can start building predictive models. Data miners spend a lot of time on data preparation!

Later today, you’ll begin exploring the data. Perhaps you’ll ...