Data is key in the modern world. Everything now is data-driven, and every sector requires data to innovate and grow.
Businesses utilize tons of data to understand industry trends, customers, and how they are doing, which helps them improve their processes and yield better results.
However, it is a daunting task to extract loads of information from an unimaginable volume of unstructured and structured data and implement them for the organization’s growth.
This is where data mining comes into play, allowing organizations to extract valuable information. In turn, this information is crucial for business intelligence and for detecting patterns, predicting possible outcomes, countering issues, and identifying new opportunities.
To make all this possible, there are many data mining techniques available to extract information, some of which are more important than others.
In this article, I’ll discuss what data mining is, how it’s done, and key data mining techniques that you can implement in your business.
What Is Data Mining?
Data mining is a technique where computers extract and organize a massive amount of data and identify patterns and relationships that organizations can utilize for business intelligence.
It is also known as knowledge discovery in data because it helps in uncovering all the relationships between data and valuable information from a pool of unstructured and structured data. This technique utilizes algorithms to extract all the underlying information and patterns that can assist in solving business problems.
Data mining serves as a crucial part of data analytics, but it relies on effective warehousing, proper computer processing, and accurate data collection. There are many data mining techniques available in the industry, but their analysis is boiled down to two primary aspects:
- Use of data mining to describe the analyzed dataset
- Use of techniques along with machine learning algorithms for predicting outcomes
Organizations, whether they are small, medium, or big, benefit from data mining as it empowers them with valuable data. They can further process and analyze this data to make meaningful observations, predict future outcomes, improve decision-making, and identify new opportunities, user behavior, fraud, and security concerns.
Evolution of Data Mining
Data mining may seem like new technology, but you will be surprised to know it is a generation-old technology that has its roots traced back to the 1760s. The idea of data mining was first implemented by Bayer’s Theorem, but it couldn’t be utilized due to a lack of tools.
It became more powerful and effective with the advent of modern technologies and powerful computers as data scientists were able to utilize them on ever-increasing data.
It was during the period of 1990s and 2000s that data mining started gaining momentum among businesses, and this popularity also facilitated the discovery of new mining techniques.
However, the article of Moneyball on a professional baseball team using data analytics to create their team roster brought data mining to the limelight in the industry.
Initially, data mining was all about mining information from tabular data. But with the increasing demand for more insights and evolving technology, text mining, image mining, and graph mining also became a part of the data mining system.
Nowadays, data mining is applied in many fields. In organizations, it plays a critical role in decision-making and market analysis.
Benefits of Data Mining
The widespread adoption of data mining is mainly attributed to its variety of benefits to people and organizations. Some of them are:
Improved Marketing and Sales
Data mining has been instrumental in boosting up marketing and sales of businesses. It allows organizations to understand customers’ requirements, predict customer behavior and create a model that helps them to sell profitable products. It also comes helpful in finding new leads and enhancing the sales chart.
Gaining Accurate, Up-to-Date Financial Information
Finances and banking institutes leverage data mining to extract accurate and up-to-date critical information. Whether it is credit reports or loan information, this technology has helped banks streamline their business effectively.
Better Customer Service
Implementing data mining in business can significantly improve customer service. Businesses can use this technology to find out major issues in their customer service department, fix them, and continue providing quick solutions to customers.
Cost Effective
Data mining helps organizations streamline their business operations while saving money in many areas. By enabling operational efficiency, businesses can create cost-effective solutions to identify customer needs and upcoming trends in the market. This helps them grow more while keeping the cost in check.
Risk Management
Data mining can help in effective risk management, allowing businesses to avoid many issues. From identifying frauds and loopholes in systems to detecting online threats, data mining can help businesses improve their cyber security efforts.
Increased Brand Loyalty
By getting insights from data mining, organizations can effectively target their customer base and create better customer relationships. Modern marketing teams utilize different techniques to get valuable insights into their customer’s needs, thereby increasing brand loyalty.
Better Decision Making
Teams of different organizations nowadays use information from data mining to make final decisions about their future moves. By getting insights into the market trend and consumers’ thoughts, they can decide what should be done and what to avoid.
Predict Future Trends
With data mining techniques, businesses can acquire useful information. This helps business analysts understand future trends and where the market is headed. Based on that, they can make modifications to the existing business strategies.
Applications of Data Mining
Data mining is used in different industries and has become a vital tool for modern businesses. Here are some of the areas where it’s applied:
Marketing
One of the main domains where data mining is used is marketing. Businesses have benefited a lot from this technique by applying it to their marketing efforts. Data mining helps them gain insights into the market, customers, trends, and competitors.
Using the extracted information, businesses not only can effectively target the right customers but also understand their demands, predict the future, make better decisions, and stay ahead of competitors.
Healthcare
Data mining has brought a revolution in the healthcare industry by enabling medical professionals to get hold of crucial information that was hard to find. By using different data mining techniques, pharmaceutical companies can understand the requirements of medicines and also find better drugs.
Banking
Data mining is widely used in the banking sector to understand customers’ behavior, create financial risk models, detect frauds, gather credit information, etc. Financial services use it to analyze market risk and identify prospective credit card customers.
Retail
By getting the necessary insights into markets and customers’ buying behavior, retail businesses can benefit a lot from data mining. For example, analyzing market trends helps fashion stores easily stock clothes that are in demand among consumers.
Manufacturing
The manufacturing sector has been taking advantage of data mining since its arrival because it has helped them to detect problems, improve uptime, and ensure operational safety. It also helps them modify their manufacturing speed according to the market demand.
Entertainment
Entertainment streaming services are active users of data mining tools for understanding viewers’ preferences and choices. They can extract user data and provide better services accordingly.
Different Data Mining Techniques
Data mining has evolved dramatically with time, giving rise to numerous techniques:
#1. Classification
Classification is a popular data mining technique that is used by data scientists to analyze the attributes of the variety of data that is being used. When the attributes of the data are identified, then these data are categorized into predefined classes.
It is a form of clustering where similar data points are extracted and utilized for analysis in order to make comparisons. It is a fundamental method that marketing agencies often use to identify a target audience and analyze their behavior.
#2. Predictive Modeling
It is a powerful technique in the data mining world that utilizes historical and current data sets to create a graphical model for future actions or outcomes.
Many organizations in the product and manufacturing sector implement this model to get insight into future trends and where the market is headed. This technique works best when it is associated with large data sets because it helps in increasing accuracy.
#3. Outlier Analysis
Outlier analysis is another effective data mining technique that is widely used by financial organizations to detect anomalies in a dataset. It is one of the primary components that is responsible for maintaining safe databases.
Unlike other techniques, it picks out unique data points that are different from others and helps data scientists find the reason behind the errors. Banking sectors often utilize it to identify abnormal credit card usage in a day and safeguard against fraudulent transactions.
#4. Data Visualization
Almost every organization, whether it is from the marketing, banking, healthcare, or entertainment sector, utilizes data visualization. It is a common technique that translates given data into a graphical form like charts, diagrams, or graphs so that everyone can understand them easily.
Data scientists mostly use this technique to showcase their findings in an easy-to-interpret form to company executives so that they can make informed decisions. Nowadays, this technique has evolved to such a level that all the findings are often represented through 3D models and augmented reality.
#5. Regression
Another popular data mining technique in today’s modern era is regression, and it is mainly used to showcase the relationship between variables in a large dataset.
It is an advantageous white box technique that is used in identifying the primary function behind the relationship between variables. E-commerce companies often use this technique to predict the age group of different customers based on their buying history.
#6. Association
There are numerous data mining techniques, but only a few techniques, like association, are widely used across industries. It helps data scientists find unique relationships between variables in a dataset.
It has a lot of similarities with machine learning techniques because it indicates specific data by a data-driven event. Many organizations, especially retail brands, use this technique for market research and to analyze the impromptu shopping habits of specific customers.
How to Perform Data Mining
Data mining is an interactive process that involves multiple steps:
#1. Defining the Objective
To start the data mining process, data scientists, analysts, and business stakeholders spend time understanding the primary goal of the organization for data mining. Based on the unique goals and requirements, they choose the suitable way to perform data mining.
#2. Collecting the Required Data
Once the objective is defined, it is time for data scientists to collect the required data sets relevant to their objective. The relevant data is collected from various sources and then stored in a data warehouse.
#3. Data Preparation
In this stage, the stored data is subjected to cleaning and organizing to make it free from unwanted noise. It is a time-consuming step that involves three phases:
- The relevant data is extracted and transformed.
- The data is cleaned by removing duplicates, updating missing values, scrubbing for outliers, checking for reasonableness, etc.
- The cleaned data is loaded into the central database
#4. Model Building
In this stage, the data scientists select the appropriate model depending on the type of data analysis. The team of data scientists will analyze the data relationships, like correlation, trends, and sequential patterns, and then decide on the model accordingly.
This phase might also involve deep learning algorithms, predictive models, and classification models depending upon the type of data that is fed. The training points in the data set may be subjected to comparison if the dataset isn’t labeled.
#5. Evaluating the Change
It is a crucial phase of the process where the result of the model is evaluated and interpreted once the data is aggregated. The result may also be presented to the decision-maker for the evaluation process. During this stage, ensure that the result of the model coincides with the defined objective.
#6. Implementation
It is the final phase, where the company will validate and understand whether the information is helpful for the organization or not. If the team finds the information impactful, they will use it to achieve their goals and devise a new strategy.
The information is shown in the form of spreadsheets and graphs, which are stored and used for identifying new issues.
Challenges in Data Mining Implementation
Like any other technology, data mining also comes with some challenges in its implementation, such as:
- Data complexity: Data mining may be able to simplify a large data set, but it takes a considerable amount of time and money to process them. It is quite a challenging task to extract information from structured, unstructured photos, music, video, and natural language texts.
- Incomplete data: Not every dataset during mining will be precise. You may find incomplete data, which may cause noise and system failure.
- Privacy risks: Privacy risks are a major challenge in data mining. There are many instances where companies gather the personal information of customers for analyzing buying trends, which may breach their privacy and lead to compliance issues.
- High operation cost: Data mining involves high operation costs in buying and maintaining servers, software, and hardware. Moreover, you will also have to maintain a large amount of data which incurs significant cost investment.
- Performance issues: The performance of a data mining system can easily get affected when a wrong method or technique is utilized. Inconsistency in data flow or database volume also contributes to performance issues.
Useful Data Mining Software and Tools
Data mining is an evolving technology. Therefore, many software organizations are creating advanced data mining software and tools to help businesses perform data mining efficiently.
The number of features may vary accordingly, but the key features that are common in most of them are in-built algorithms, data preparation, predictive models, GUI-based platform, and deployment models.
Some of the popular data mining software that is widely used are Orange Data Mining, R Software Environment, Anaconda, SAS Data Mining, Rattle, Rapid Miner, DataMelt, and Apache Mahout. Besides them, you can utilize Elki, Weka, and sci-kit-learn data mining, as they are free, open-source technologies.
Conclusion
Data mining has made things easier for businesses and helped them grow significantly. They can utilize different data mining techniques to gather information and look at insights that were previously hard to obtain.
I hope this article helps you understand data mining and different data mining techniques so that you can implement them to acquire the required insights and grow your business more.
Next, you may also read about Data Discovery and its tools.
