Businesses often use software to look for patterns in large amounts of data in order to learn more about their consumers to develop more effective marketing strategies. It is also used to determine risk factors and make effective decisions such as increasing or decreasing sales cost in a business.
Data mining is dependent on the effectiveness of data collection and computer processing.
‘’The data mining process breaks down into five steps. First, organizations collect data and load it into their data warehouses. Next, they store and manage the data, either on in-house servers or the cloud. Business analysts, management teams and information technology professionals access the data and determine how they want to organise it.
Then, application software sorts the data based on the user’s results, and finally, the end-user presents the data in an easy-to-share format, such as a graph or table.’’
Data mining uses sophisticated mathematical algorithms to segment the data and evaluate the probability of future events.
Over the past ten years, with the growth of the industrial evolution, ‘’advances in processing power and speed have enabled us to move beyond manual, tedious and time-consuming practices to quick, easy and automated data analysis. The more complex the data sets collected, the more potential there is to uncover relevant insights. ‘’
The Media, technological industries, telecommunications providers and insurers, among others, are using data mining to discover relationships among everything from price changes, promotions and demographics to how the economy, risk, competition and social media are affecting their businesses, revenues, operations and consumer relationships.
Data mining, with the introduction of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, has become a composite discipline that represents a variety of methods or techniques that can be used in different analytic capabilities to address a gamut of organizational needs, ask different types of questions and use varying levels of human input or rules to arrive at a decision.
