Ahead of the Curve: Data Miner

December 11, 2008 RSS Feed Print

Data Miner. There's always a new magic pill that's supposed to make businesses more successful. Some examples from the past decade: the Six Sigma approach to quality improvement, diversity training, and data mining. Those fads appear to be fading—except for data mining, the use of statistics to predict or explain customer behavior. Examples: Did a new drug really work better than the current gold-standard drug? What products should be pitched to each of your previous online customers? Which times of the year and for which markets should production be increased? How likely is it that credit card spending is fraudulent?

Data mining is a great career for people who would enjoy using statistics to unearth patterns in data, using ever more powerful software. Opportunities are particularly good if you also have business sense and the ability to tease out the information that bosses really want to know.

Learn more: UCLA overview of data mining, Wikipedia profile on data mining, and career advancement in data mining.

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DATA MINING LEARNING : BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS
My suggestion is to read two types of books - (1) one that explains the concepts from a theoretical and abstract perspective and (2) another that is practical and that enables you to work with an existing tool. For example if you are going to download the open-source tool Weka then the practical book would be
- "Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques" by Witten and Franke.
If you are going to download R then the book should probably be
- "Data Mining with R" by Luis Torgo (as mentioned in one of the comments connected to this discussion).
My recommendation on a book that explains data mining from a theoretical/abstract perspective is
- "Principles of Data Mining" by Hand, Mannila and Smyth.
I am reading this book right now, and while it is a slow read with quite a bit of abstraction, it is excellent. To learn data mining it is important to understand the foundational level concepts before learning the practical techniques and tools described in the two books above (on Weka and R respectively).
If you want something even more abstract you may want to read the lecture notes from the MIT online course directory - search for a course named "Data Mining" - I found the lecture notes too abstract and difficult to comprehend.
In summary, first read "Principles of Data Mining" by Hand, Mannila and Smyth. Then, either read "Data Mining: Practical Machine Leaning Tools and Techniques" by Witten and Franke OR read "Data Mining with R" by Torgo, depending on which tool you want to learn. I have been learning Weka - there are excellent resources such as data sets and the tool is easy to use.

Shankar Saikia of CA 5:30PM January 14, 2010

If this really is a job and if it can be done from home.... sign me up.... I always seem to get to know people quickly and they tell me stuff that it takes others a lifetime to know and I find out with a few simple questions.... ..but then again I ask... I'm not nosey...just interested. I live about an hour north of the twin cities and I need a job
asap Thanks

Mary Wise of MN 12:23AM September 25, 2009

Do you like to research information that a large corporation or car dealership that is well established, with a huge customer base, has in its data base, with specific names and telephone numbers of actual previuos customers, that you can call, personally to encourage them to come over to the showrroom and just look at the latest models of vehicles that are now being produced by that dealers product line. I was offered a job that followed this model. I was a telemarketer for 15 to 20 years, cold calling 5 to 6 days a week before the government came out with the do-not-call list. Right now the big three American auto companies are searching for different ways to bring buyers into their showrooms. This idea could be a perfect match of experience, enthusiasm for cars, and the pent up demand for new autos. I know a specific dealer in Detroit that was going to offer me this kind of job. The potential is everywhere and the Big three have shed almost all of their less profitable dealerships with small customer bases. If you like the telephone and you enjoy computers and working with people and cars its a perfect match. Business owners/car dealers will be glad to open up their books i.e. data bases for the right individual to begin their DATA MINING career.

David P. Gepford of MI 4:53AM August 24, 2009

Ahead of the Curve: Data Miner

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