eBooks

This eBook includes Chapter 3 from industry experts Jeff Deal and Gerhard Pilcher’s book Mining Your Own Business, A Primer for Executives on Understanding and Employing Data Mining and Predictive Analytics. Chapter 3 titled “Leading a Data Analytics Initiative” covers the key challenges and considerations for business leaders employing analytics to provide data-drive insight.

Every technical project involves some sort of analytics, ranging from simply reporting key facts, to predicting new events. In this eBook we define ten increasingly sophisticated levels of analytics so that teams can assess where they stand and to what they aspire. The eBook clarifies definitions of three types of analytic inquiry and four categories of modeling technology and illustrates these levels with examples using tabular data representations commonly found in spreadsheets and single database tables. Additionally, the Levels are extended to encompass emerging data types such as time series, spatial data, and graph data, by providing data complexity as second dimension for categorization alongside algorithmic sophistication.

In two decades of mining data from diverse fields, we have made many mistakes, which may yet lead to wisdom. In this eBook, we briefly describe, and illustrate from examples, what we believe are the “Top 10” mistakes of data mining, in terms of frequency and seriousness. Most are basic, though a few are subtle. All have, when undetected, left analysts worse off than if they’d never looked at their data.