Data Mining is primarily used today by companies with a strong consumer focus — retail, financial, communication, and marketing organizations, to “drill down” into their transactional data and determine pricing, customer preferences and product positioning, impact on sales, customer satisfaction and corporate profits. With data mining, a retailer can use point-of-sale records of customer purchases to develop products and promotions to appeal to specific customer segments.
Here is the list of 14 other important areas where data mining is widely used:
Future Healthcare:
Data mining holds great potential to improve health systems. It uses data and analytics to identify best practices that improve care and reduce costs. Researchers use data mining approaches like multi-dimensional databases, machine learning, soft computing, data visualization and statistics. Mining can be used to predict the volume of patients in every category. Processes are developed that make sure that the patients receive appropriate care at the right place and at the right time. Data mining can also help healthcare insurers to detect fraud and abuse.
Market Basket Analysis:
Market basket analysis is a modelling technique based upon a theory that if you buy a certain group of items you are more likely to buy another group of items. This technique may allow the retailer to understand the purchase behaviour of a buyer. This information may help the retailer to know the buyer’s needs and change the store’s layout accordingly. Using differential analysis comparison of results between different stores, between customers in different demographic groups can be done.
Education:
There is a new emerging field, called Educational Data Mining, concerns with developing methods that discover knowledge from data originating from educational Environments. The goals of EDM are identified as predicting students’ future learning behaviour, studying the effects of educational support, and advancing scientific knowledge about learning. Data mining can be used by an institution to take accurate decisions and also to predict the results of the student. With the results the institution can focus on what to teach and how to teach. Learning pattern of the students can be captured and used to develop techniques to teach them.
Manufacturing Engineering:
Knowledge is the best asset a manufacturing enterprise would possess. Data mining tools can be very useful to discover patterns in complex manufacturing process. Data mining can be used in system-level designing to extract the relationships between product architecture, product portfolio, and customer needs data. It can also be used to predict the product development span time, cost, and dependencies among other tasks.
CRM:
Customer Relationship Management is all about acquiring and retaining customers, also improving customers’ loyalty and implementing customer focused strategies. To maintain a proper relationship with a customer a business need to collect data and analyse the information. This is where data mining plays its part. With data mining technologies the collected data can be used for analysis. Instead of being confused where to focus to retain customer, the seekers for the solution get filtered results.
Fraud Detection:
Billions of dollars have been lost to the action of frauds. Traditional methods of fraud detection are time consuming and complex. Data mining aids in providing meaningful patterns and turning data into information. Any information that is valid and useful is knowledge. A perfect fraud detection system should protect information of all the users. A supervised method includes collection of sample records. These records are classified fraudulent or non-fraudulent. A model is built using this data and the algorithm is made to identify whether the record is fraudulent or not.
Intrusion Detection:
Any action that will compromise the integrity and confidentiality of a resource is an intrusion. The defensive measures to avoid an intrusion includes user authentication, avoid programming errors, and information protection. Data mining can help improve intrusion detection by adding a level of focus to anomaly detection. It helps an analyst to distinguish an activity from common everyday network activity. Data mining also helps extract data which is more relevant to the problem.
Lie Detection:
Apprehending a criminal is easy whereas bringing out the truth from him is difficult. Law enforcement can use mining techniques to investigate crimes, monitor communication of suspected terrorists. This filed includes text mining also. This process seeks to find meaningful patterns in data which is usually unstructured text. The data sample collected from previous investigations are compared and a model for lie detection is created. With this model processes can be created according to the necessity.
Customer Segmentation:
Traditional market research may help us to segment customers but data mining goes in deep and increases market effectiveness. Data mining aids in aligning the customers into a distinct segment and can tailor the needs according to the customers Market is always about retaining the customers. Data mining allows to find a segment of customers based on vulnerability and the business could offer them with special offers and enhance satisfaction.
Financial Banking:
With computerised banking everywhere huge amount of data is supposed to be generated with new transactions. Data mining can contribute to solving business problems in banking and finance by finding patterns, causalities, and correlations in business information and market prices that are not immediately apparent to managers because the volume data is too large or is generated too quickly to screen by experts. The managers may find this information for better segmenting, targeting, acquiring, retaining and maintaining a profitable customer.
Corporate Surveillance:
Corporate surveillance is the monitoring of a person or group’s behaviour by a corporation. The data collected is most often used for marketing purposes or sold to other corporations, but is also regularly shared with government agencies. It can be used by the business to tailor their products desirable by their customers. The data can be used for direct marketing purposes, such as the targeted advertisements on Google and Yahoo, where ads are targeted to the user of the search engine by analyzing their search history and emails.
Research Analysis:
History shows that we have witnessed revolutionary changes in research. Data mining is helpful in data cleaning, data pre-processing and integration of databases. The researchers can find any similar data from the database that might bring any change in the research. Identification of any co-occurring sequences and the correlation between any activities can be known. Data visualization and visual data mining provide us with a clear view of the data.
Criminal Investigation:
Criminology is a process that aims to identify crime characteristics. Actually crime analysis includes exploring and detecting crimes and their relationships with criminals. The high volume of crime datasets and also the complexity of relationships between these kinds of data have made criminology an appropriate field for applying data mining techniques. Text based crime reports can be converted into word processing files. These information can be used to perform crime matching process.
Bio Informatics:
Data Mining approaches seem ideally suited for Bioinformatics, since it is data-rich. Mining biological data helps to extract useful knowledge from massive datasets gathered in biology, and in other related life sciences areas such as medicine and neuroscience. Applications of data mining to bioinformatics include gene finding, protein function inference, disease diagnosis, disease prognosis, disease treatment optimization, protein and gene interaction network reconstruction, data cleansing, and protein subcellular location prediction.
