The newest edition of the leading introductory book on data mining, fully updated and revised

Who will remain a loyal customer and who won't? Which messages are most effective with which segments? How can customer value be maximized? This book supplies powerful tools for extracting the answers to these and other crucial business questions from the corporate databases where they lie buried. In the years since the first edition of this book, data mining has grown to become an indispensable tool of modern business. In this latest edition, Linoff and Berry have made extensive updates and revisions to every chapter and added several new ones. The book retains the focus of earlier editions--showing marketing analysts, business managers, and data mining specialists how to harness data mining methods and techniques to solve important business problems. While never sacrificing accuracy for the sake of simplicity, Linoff and Berry present even complex topics in clear, concise English with minimal use of technical jargon or mathematical formulas. Technical topics are illustrated with case studies and practical real-world examples drawn from the authors' experiences, and every chapter contains valuable tips for practitioners. Among the techniques newly covered, or covered in greater depth, are linear and logistic regression models, incremental response (uplift) modeling, naïve Bayesian models, table lookup models, similarity models, radial basis function networks, expectation maximization (EM) clustering, and swarm intelligence. New chapters are devoted to data preparation, derived variables, principal components and other variable reduction techniques, and text mining.

After establishing the business context with an overview of data mining applications, and introducing aspects of data mining methodology common to all data mining projects, the book covers each important data mining technique in detail.

This third edition of Data Mining Techniques covers such topics as:

• How to create stable, long-lasting predictive models

• Data preparation and variable selection

• Modeling specific targets with directed techniques such as regression, decision trees, neural networks, and memory based reasoning

• Finding patterns with undirected techniques such as clustering, association rules, and link analysis

• Modeling business time-to-event problems such as time to next purchase and expected remaining lifetime

• Mining unstructured text

The companion website provides data that can be used to test out the various data mining techniques in the book.

GORDON S. LINOFF and MICHAEL J. A. BERRY are the founders of Data Miners, Inc., a consultancy specializing in data mining. They have jointly authored two of the leading data mining titles in the field, Data Mining Techniques and Mastering Data Mining (both from Wiley). They each have decades of experience applying data mining techniques to business problems in marketing and customer relationship management.