Data Mining For Dummies

Learn to:

• Understand key data mining concepts and best practices
• Create a data model and test its validity
• Interpret results and communicate your findings
• Make a business case for investing in data mining

Delve into your data for the key to success

This friendly guide shows you why it doesn’t take a data scientist to reap the benefits of exploring data independently, making informative discoveries, and putting the information to work. Written for those who know more about their business than math, this resource quickly gets you up-to-speed on how data mining can push your company to the top.

• Learn the laws of data mining — get a grip on the principles of data mining, find out how to make data your informant, and set your data mining goals
• A day in the life of a data miner — get to know the members of a typical data mining team, leverage your colleagues’ complementary skills and knowledge, and frame your work with a standard industry practice
• Define and refine — establish a framework for data mining, drill into the CRISP-DM process, and establish good habits
• Make a career in modeling — discover why modeling is the data miner’s path to knowing the unknown
• Dig into your data — draw on the knowledge that you and other members of your team have accumulated from experience and training to extract useful information from data

Open the book and find:

• Common-sense steps for data mining success
• Guidance on letting your business needs direct your software selection process
• Ways to unearth data you already have
• How to conduct experiments—no lab coat required
• Public sources for data
• Guidance on buying data and searching for suppliers
• Plain-English explanations of correlation
• The most common nonlinear models