Foreword
The world is absolutely exploding with digitally born data. Financial transactions, online advertising analytics, consumer preference information, and the results of scientific discovery mean tremendous volumes of data exist in both structured and unstructured stores today. And it is growing faster than ever before, fueled by both technology and a new generation of people adopting and integrating technology into all aspects of their lives.
Business intelligence practitioners struggle to make sense of the data in their charge to help their businesses operate with better understanding of what is influencing results. Trends are evolving and changing more quickly than ever before. It is no longer enough to look at historical data to just determine what happened. Aided by data mining, you can more readily understand why something happened. It can make the difference in whether history — good or bad — repeats itself. Because trends change at such great speed today, automated analysis and sophisticated algorithms for identifying trends, finding outliers, and predicting future courses quickly can be the difference between winning and just competing. Data mining provides the means to make sense of tremendous volumes of data by automating the processes of categorizing and clustering common elements, identifying trends and anomalies in the data, and predicting what will happen given those factors.
I have had the pleasure to work alongside (and learn directly from) Jamie MacLennan and ...
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