What is Data Mining?/ How can data mining can help any business?

According to Williams “Data mining is the art and science of intelligent data analysis.” And it aims is to discover meaningful insights and knowledge from data. Tough accurate, the previous description hardly sums up the effect that data mining is having on the world around us. These effects certainly appear to be positive on the surface but, is big data minding our privacy while mining our data? Or, can the two realistically even be separated?
Let’s start off with the neigh Sayers of the data mining community. Crawford writes “We are now faced with large-scale experiments on city streets in which people are in a state of forced participation, without any real ability to negotiate the terms and often without the knowledge that their data are being collected.” And he’s right. In the age of data mining nearly every decision you make – whether it is what to eat for lunch or where you buy a shirt – that information along with some information about yourself will be logged and later analyzed. This information will come full circle back to you by way of a direct mailer, popup ad, a solicitation phone call or one of many other formats. The gathering and then drilling through large amounts of information for specific purpose (even if that purpose is not yet known, is called data mining.
Privacy issues aside, there are, from business perspective, many great advantages to mining data. As Mascot puts it “big data has leveraged big ROI. What he means by this, is that the time and money spend on gathering, analyzing and making predictions based on large amounts of data is well worth the price of admission.

One such case is that of the Carolinas HealthCare System who “purchases the data from brokers who cull public records, store loyalty program transactions, and credit card purchases.” “The idea is to use Big Data and predictive models to think about population health and drill down to the individual levels,” Once on individual level, recommendations can be made once comparing ones medical records with their personal spending; thus life style choices. Though, considered highly intrusive by some; one could hardly argue the benefits of ensuring that someone with Diabetes does not purchase too much candy. This will allow the hospital to streamline procedures and ultimately reduce costs.


Outline one data mining technique as discussed by Rijmenam (2014) and Williams (2011) and provide its benefits and negative aspects.

Williams highlighted the idea of Data Mining team. In this frame work there are specialized players working together for the goals of the overall project. such as the data miners, domain experts and data experts. Together they will mine usefulness out data. The downside to this framework is that there typically isn’t any sort of industry expertise amongst the data folks. This issue will be attempted to be remedies through a series of meeting but, could be a fatal issue if not addressed correctly
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Rijmenam, outlines a classic statistical method known as regression analysis in data mining. Regression analysis tries to define the dependency between variable. This model is highly useful in making models that have predictive capabilities. The down side to regression analysis is that it assumes a one-way causal effect from one variable to the response of another. In other words, this type of analysis can show the one variable is dependent on another but not vice-versa