Data Mining

Data Mining and Predictive Analysis

Strayer University

Information System for Decision Making

CIS 500

Dr. Gregory Hart

August 28, 2012

Data Mining and Predictive Analysis

Determine the benefits of data mining to the businesses when employing:

Predictive analytics to understand the behavior of customers

Predictive analytics is used in business to forecast and model services and products to gain a competitive advantage. Understanding customer behavior during certain periods of time or products most purchased by customers provides extremely important information that focuses a company’s marketing and product lines. In order to analyze and predict customer behavior, past behavior must be available. This is how data mining comes into the picture. Data is often buried deep within large databases making it not useful unless a search is conducted using the correct parameters to bring forward the desired information. Data mining makes this possible through various applications designed to sort through the massive amounts of data in order to provide past information that will be used to conduct predictive analysis. With this information, a company or business can target customer needs, ensure the correct products are available when needed, and control costs by reducing inventory during low sales time or eliminating products that do not sale.

Association discovery in products sold to customers

Association discovery is used to identify products or services that share a particular association. For example through association discovery, a business may identify that a customer who purchases cold medicine may also purchase orange juice. In this hypothetical situation, the business may decide to offer specials on orange juice during cold and flu seasons. Through association discovery, a business can increase sales by tying products and services together that are typically purchased by customers.

Web mining to discover business intelligence from Web...