Real-World Data Mining: Applied Business Analytics and Decision Making

3. The Data Mining Process

As has been the case in many other computational paradigms, extracting knowledge from large data repositories (i.e., data mining) started as trial-and-error experimental projects. Many practitioners have looked at the problem from the perspective of trying to characterize what works and what doesn’t. For quite some time, data mining projects were carried out as rather artistic experimental endeavors. However, in order to methodically conduct data mining analysis, a standardized process needed to be developed and followed. Based on best practices, data mining researchers and practitioners have proposed several processes—workflows in the form of simple step-by-step methodologies—to maximize the likelihood of success in ...