Practical Predictive Analytics

Internal data

Your own internal data is the first and best place to start. Many projects start with examining data from business operational systems, such as sales systems. You can start by analyzing transaction data, such as looking at all orders for a customer and analyzing the number of units sold, total sales price, and so on. However, transaction data by itself does not tell you anything about the customer. You need to also enrich your basic data by augmenting it with other attributes which can be obtained by matching common elements of your database transactions (such as customer ID, product keys) with valuable data which exists in other related databases. For example, a rich source of data is demographic and attitudinal data which ...