The goal of data mining is to utilize large amounts of collected information to reveal patterns in the data. These patterns can be analyzed to determine specific relationships and often utilized to create predictive models for critical decision supports. These techniques have found success in wide variety of applications such as marketing, sales forecasting, manufacturing, inventory management, scientific discovery, medicine, sports, customer relationship management, customer acquisition and so on. In general, businesses can make better decisions to reduce waste, improve efficiency, lower costs, and increase profits.
Use cases
Target using predictive analytics to predict and influence shopping habits. See article in the following link.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html
Target provides products for almost every aspect of life, however, most people only associate the store with certain items: cleaning products, socks, toilet paper, etc. Convincing consumers to use Target for all products is a difficult task and it's difficult to break those habits. However, their researchers found that during pregnancy, the shopping patterns becomes in flux and it is much easier to convert consumer habits. Many retailers know this and so when a family gives birth to a child, retailers flood their mail box with pamphlets and brochures. To compete and get a leg up, target utilized data mining and predictive analytics to determine certain purchasing patterns suggest that a women is pregnant. For instance, when someone purchases certain types of vitamins or health care products, Target is not only able to predict that a baby is due, but also an approximate delivery date. Utilizing this information, they're able to provide very targeted advertisement to these expected mothers before the competition. "Soon after the new ad campaign began, Target’s Mom and Baby sales exploded." Sales were up and the company's president boasted about their ability to focus on "specific guest segments such as mom and baby". Whether Target actually predicted the pregnancy maybe controversial. But data driven marketing with predictive analytics is here to stay.
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Services provided by Quadbase Systems Inc.
We have expertise in data mining and predictive analytics using tools such as R, Microsoft Azure ML, and Rapidminer. Our team works with your business analysts to define the use case, collect and prepare data for making the predictive models, provide custom solution with advanced reporting and great looking, interactive dashboards, data visualization with EspressReport ES.