The MiningMart Approach
Katharina J. Morik, Martin Scholz · 2002
The use of very large databases has enhanced in the last years from supporting transactions to additionally reporting business trends. The interest in analysing the data has increased. One important topic is customer relationship management with the particular tasks of customer segmentation, customer profitability, customer retention, and customer acquisition (e.g. by direct mailing). Other tasks are the prediction of sales in order to minimize stocks, the prediction of electricity consumption or telecommunication services at particular day times in order to minimize the use of external services or optimize network routing, respectively. The health sector demands several analysis tasks for resource management, quality control, and decision making. On-line Analytical Processing (OLAP) offers interactive data analysis by aggregating data and counting the frequencies. This already answers questions like the following: What are the attributes of my most frequent customers? Which are the frequently sold products? How many unpaid bills do I have to expect per year? How many returns did I receive after my last direct mailing action?