Data Mining for the Masses, Third Edition: With Implementations in RapidMiner and R

Some say we live in the Information Age; others, the Social Age; and still others, the Big Data Age. Regardless of what name we give it, we live in an age that generates monumental amounts of data—in all different kinds of formats. In business, and in our personal lives, we use smartphones and tablets, web sites and watches; with apps and interfaces to shop, learn, entertain and inform. Businesses increasingly use technology to interact with consumers to provide marketing, customer service, product information and more. All of this technological activity generates data, and we’re increasingly good at gathering, storing and analyzing it. Data mining can help to identify interesting patterns and messages that exist in data, often hidden beneath the surface. In this modern age of information systems, it is easier than ever before to extract meaning from data. From classification to prediction, data mining can help. In Data Mining for the Masses, Third Edition, professor Matt North—a former risk analyst and software engineer at eBay—uses simple examples and clear explanations with free, powerful software tools to teach you the basics of data mining. In this Third Edition, implementations of these examples are offered in current versions of the RapidMiner software, and in the increasingly popular R Statistical Package. You’ve got more data than ever before and you know it’s got value, if only you can figure out how to get to it. This book can show you how. Let’s start digging!