Data Mining

This short revision video introduces the concept of data mining.

What is data mining?

Data mining is the process of analysing data from different perspectives and summarising it into useful information, including discovery of previously unknown interesting patterns, unusual records or dependencies.

There are many potential business benefits from effective data mining, including:

Identifying previously unseen relationships between business data sets
Better predicting future trends & behaviours
Extract commercial (e.g. performance insights) from big data sets
Generating actionable strategies built on data insights (e.g. positioning and targeting for market segments)

Data mining is a particularly powerful series of techniques to support marketing competitiveness.

Examples include:

Sales forecasting: analysing when customers bought to predict when they will buy again

Database marketing: examining customer purchasing patterns and looking at the demographics and psychographics of customers to build predictive profiles

Market segmentation: a classic use of data mining, using data to break down a market into meaningful segments like age, income, occupation or gender

E-commerce basket analysis: using mined data to predict future customer behavior by past performance, including purchases and preferences