Data Mining For Dummies

Chapter 15

Your Exciting Career in Modeling

In This Chapter

Harnessing mathematical models

Investigating decision trees

Exposing the inner workings of neural networks

Now you’re really getting to the data-mining goodies. Modeling is the data miner’s path to knowing the unknown, or at least making well-informed, valuable guesses about the unknown. Data miners have been known to effectively predict which new customers will go on to become big spenders, which process conditions will lead to serious manufacturing problems, and which insurance claims hint of fraud.

You can be the next data miner to look into the unknown and make exciting discoveries. You won’t need psychic powers or a crystal ball, but you’ll need a good grasp of data-mining staples like decision trees, neural networks, and clustering.

This chapter introduces you to those staples and helps you on your way to your career in data modeling! This is the part of the job that data miners often love most, because it’s here that you’ll discover the information that helps drive good business decisions.

Grasping Modeling Concepts

As a data miner, you look for useful patterns in data. Your goal is to discover something that has ...