Sort Out the Basics of Data Mining Before Getting Started
While it’s crucial to store your company’s data as distinct files and pieces of information for general record-keeping, your stored data also contains in-depth patterns, trends and relationships that can help you solve problems and gain insights. When you need to pinpoint and extract such information, data mining is the process that allows your IT team to sift through large volumes of data.
Whether you need to dig into your stored data to solve a problem by finding a specific type or piece of data, or you need to analyze your data simply because it will help strengthen your business, data mining works as the perfect tool. Once you find and extract the data in your search, you can transform it into the necessary structure to help you achieve your goals. Data mining helps you understand how your business’s elements relate to each other in ways you might not otherwise understand in our world of big data.
Why Do You Need to Start a Data Mining Project?
Your data offers a deep well of uses that far exceed the original reasons for its collection. Your organization’s large stores of data are complex, offering patterns — your data even tells complex stories about your business — that your IT team must learn to identify and harness to further your business. While you understand that data mining serves to help you extract hidden predictive information from large databases, it may further help you to consider some of the most common reasons IT departments launch data mining projects:
- Pinpoint causes of triggers for problems and issues in various industries to help stave off large-scale disasters or, at the very least, to minimize damage.
- Determine discrepancies and anomalies in the system that fall outside business objectives.
- Spot indications of fraud, overpayments and financial violations.
- Establish efficient procedures and approaches to maximize those and applying to similar processes and tasks.
- Identify customer buying trends and focus marketing to improve sales and maximize revenue.
At its core, data mining gives you the tools to address various complex issues that lie deep within your data warehouse. Without utilizing a tool as invaluable as data mining, which helps unveil complex patterns to your IT team, you limit the usefulness of your business’s data.
How Does Data Mining Work?
Data mining serves as the link between large-scale data stores and the separate transaction and analytical systems that evolved out of those stores. Based on your specific end-user queries, the data mining techniques that you employ will help analyze meaningful relationships and patterns in your data.
Key Data Mining Techniques
There are several different kinds of data mining techniques for you to consider before getting started on your project. However, many companies often create their own techniques or tailor ones they have adopted to fit their own organization’s specific computer language and goals. Explore a few of the most common data mining techniques to gain critical information about the existing relationships in your data that can sometimes change the course of your business:
- Association. Searching for patterns when one event is connected to another event.
- Classification. Locating data in predetermined groups or criteria. Examples of such predetermined classified criteria include searching for instances of higher traffic to the company’s website or peak hours at a restaurant.
- Clustering. Targeting data based on logical relationships, such as customer preferences that may link to specific marketing strategies.
- Sequential Patterns. This type of data mining involves anticipating behavior patterns and trends, which may involve look at a customer’s previous buying trends to help predict future purchases.
- Anomaly Detection. Anomaly detection helps you pinpoint items, events or observations that stray from regular and expected patterns in a dataset.
- Prediction. This comprehensive data mining technique involves analyzing trends, classification, pattern matching and relation to help make grounded predictions about everything from identifying fraud or foreseeing large-scale company profits.
- Decision Trees. Closely related to association and prediction techniques, is useful as a part of the selection criteria or as a supporting factor for specific data within the overall data storage structure.
Launch Your Own Data Mining Project
If you have already delved into data mining, but due to the complexity of your data or the highly specific nature of your project, you have not achieved your desired results, I.S. Partners, LLC. can help.
Please reach out to our customer service team by calling us at 215-675-1400 or send us a message to learn more about how we execute data queries to identify, analyze and present issues we discover from our data query results, which we then prepare into detailed reports available to your company’s management and other stakeholders who want to see results.
