Welcome to Prometheus Asia
What is Data Mining?
Data Mining is the process of extracting actionable insights from raw data through the discovery of interesting patterns/trends. Many people treat data mining as a synonym for another popularly used term, knowledge discovery in databases (KDD). In its strictest sense, data mining is only one step in the end-to-end knowledge discovery process, albeit an essential one, since it uncovers hidden patterns for evaluation. However, in the industry as well as in the database research milieu, these two terms are often
used interchangeably.
Applications in Data Mining has seen an almost “cliff-like” ramp-up in the past 2 decades pervading almost every industry from telecommunication to banking to pharmaceuticals to retail to manufacturing and recently hospitality. The convenience and affordability of data storage solutions coupled with the industry awareness has given rise to the heightened adoption of data mining.
Though data mining is a well-structured scientific process, the experiential knowledge of a practitioner to yield a viable solution is extremely important, thus rendering it an art alike.
As an example, a simply stated business problem such as:
“Recent trend of reducing donor funds from alumnus is being observed.”
can be restated into a data mining framework such as below,
“Effectively identify the likely set of donor alumni to increase donor funds, while minimising marketing costs, and to ensure non-violation of customer contact protocol and avoid donor fatigue.”
At Prometheus, we work closely with our clients to deliver solutions that enable them to make the RIGHT business decisions through effective data analysis. The result is increased confidence in attaining their business goals, be it to improve profits, to reduce costs, or to better understand their business drivers.
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