GAMING

Palo Alto, Calif. – Data mining helps businesses sort large volumes of data to detect patterns of behavior. Consequently, these businesses can develop potentially profitable marketing, customer relationship, and communication strategies, among other useful tasks. Without mining software, the data can take weeks or even months of analysis by a trained task force of statisticians, in-house or hired, which inevitably commands a high price. "As 80 percent of all customer data is unstructured – including such random but potentially relevant information contained in e-mails, letters, and scribbled notes – successfully integrating unstructured with structured data presents a challenge to businesses," observes Technical Insights Research Analyst Michael Valenti. While data mining can address all these limitations, persuading companies to invest in analytic tools is a challenge. To this end, providers are focusing on developing specific business-oriented solutions including advanced software that can analyze a terabyte of data – equivalent to the storage capacity of a million floppy disks – in a fraction of the time needed for human analysis. Keeping in mind the fact that many end users may not be highly skilled statisticians, data mining solutions providers are designing user-friendly software tools with visual interfaces that literally walk the user through the process. This eliminates the need to hire expert data mining personnel. Leading data mining providers and IT professionals are now attempting to move statistical models from research to production. The development of the predictive modeling markup language (PMML) offers the advantage of enabling data mining vendors to share models. "As vendors continue to ratify PMML, which is still evolving, data mining will be more easily deployed and readily accepted," says Valenti. Data mining is also increasingly making its presence felt in the medical sector. Pharmaceutical companies are using these tools to accelerate the lengthy process of new drug development, thereby reducing time-to-market as well as realize significant savings.