What is Data Mining?
Data Mining isn’t a term most companies and individuals are unfamiliar with, however, there seems to be a bit of controversy around the term, its meaning, and the process itself. At its core, data mining is a way to explore and analyze data in large quantities to discover patterns and practices. Although this is a broad definition, we can simply define the process as the search, collection, filtration, and analyzation of captured data.
Sorting through data to find connections and information for trend prediction is not new, but the term “data mining” itself wasn’t neologized until the early 1990s. In most cases, data mining is used to better understand current and future customers. Smart marketing and targeting can help companies of any size tailor their services to meet consumer needs.
Is it Important?
You could be asking yourself, why is data mining important for me or my business? The process itself takes large pools or sets of your corporate data and uses it to identify what that collected data means about its current prosperity. As the data industry continues to grow, the demand for data analysts, scientists, and the like grows too. What may look like meaningless data to the average person, could be converted into something of worth by a professional; data that could potentially help a business to make better decisions for the future of their company.
Data mining can help an individual or team make smarter decisions regarding how they run campaigns, predict future trends, and the overall market. Most importantly, with the help of this process, analysts have a chance to understand the behaviors of customers at a deeper level, developing insight into what your customer wants and needs, and how you can better reach them.
The Advantages of Data Analysis
- Sift through the repetitive information to find the data that matters
- Developing a greater understanding of the relevance of the information
- Helps you make informed decisions and improve planning
- Increase customer interactions through insights
The Process
The process itself takes about 6 steps to complete. From the initial collection of data to its eventual use in assisting the eventual progression of your business.
1. Understanding for Businesses
Data mining is first and foremost about the goals of your company. Establishing goals, and developing manageable actions to help you achieve your business intentions.
2. Understanding the Data
After your goals are determined, it’s time to collect the data from all applicable sources. To ensure that everyone understands the data presented visual aids of all sorts are used to display findings.
3. Presenting the Data
This is where the data collected is converted into something meaningful. All data is analyzed, cleansed, and transformed from its original workflow to actual data to be prepped.
4. Data Modeling
Once the primary workflow has been created from the sorted data, it’s time to create mathematical models that are used to further find patterns using various data tools.
5. Evaluation
The data workflows and models are eventually evaluated, compared and contrasted to the goals and current timelines of a company to determine the next steps for the company’s future.
6. Deployment
During this final stage of the process, analysts and experts will present the data to you in a way that’s simple to understand and leads back to business understanding.
How Can We Help You
There are different types and trends for data mining, and its successful usage is only likely to continue. Align BI can help your business collect and utilize your corporate data. By monetizing and making that data tangible, we can help you become more effective and in turn profitable.