Free Essays, Term Papers, Research Papers at Anti Essays

Introduction

Companies nowadays are operating in a cutthroat competitive marketplace that requires business managers to effectively collect, organize, analyze, and interpret market statistical data to determine what type of products and services to offer today and for the future.

Companies are constantly faced with having to adapt to new market dynamics and, as such, are constantly faced with adjusting pricing and negotiating strategies in order to stay competitive by analyzing data and qualitative industry statistics into practical information where it can be used to cut costs and increase profits.

So the expectation for understanding historical customer trends would greatly increase the success in the present and future. Increasing the speed of interpretation of those customer trends and activities is at the heart of many corporate management strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of automated tools that assist in the process of analyzing and interpreting customer trends such as Data Mining, Data Warehousing, OLAP, and Psychographic, in a timely way, to counter these business challenges.

What is Data Mining?

Data mining is about sorting through large amounts of statistics and data to find patterns, establish relationships, and discover knowledge. It is a step in the process known as knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) .

Data mining uses techniques developed in artificial intelligence (AI), statistics, and other branches of computer science and mathematics. AI is the attempt to design systems that process information in a manner similar to the way a person thinks. AI includes the study and application of methods for finding rules and patterns in data. Statistics involves constructing mathematical models of data and determining correlations.

Advantages of using Data Mining

• Data mining tools are...