Practical Predictive Analytics

Text mining techniques

Most legacy predictive analytics techniques were originally designed to work with structured data. However, that has changed with the advent of text mining techniques, which are able to process and visualize unstructured data. Some of the more popular tools are:

• Word clouds: Word clouds are graphical representations of word frequencies or concepts and would be a simple tool to present important words in a corpus (collection of text documents) to management.

Here is an example of a word cloud produced from Lincoln's Gettysburg address (Bliss Copy) (Gettysburg Address, 1863). To limit the number of words displayed, set min.freq=2, so that only words which appear at least two times will be displayed. Notice that the ...