Information - Man(agement) :: Data Mining :: Psychology :: Future

More then 2 weeks have passed since the beginning of the Data Mining Cup 2007 and I know you guys are pretty far by now. I guess many of you already assembled dozens of prediction rules and models and are finetuning their systems.
But as I know myself, we all tend to draw conclusions much too fast. Let’s see if we have spend enough time on understanding and restructuring the data.

This is the very first statistic you should look at. The frequency of customer respondings on coupon A or B or Not responding at all. Remember from the Scenario, that each person of the 50k recieved coupon A and B via mail and here we have the respondings:

After performing some simple grouping operations on the customers you can see groups with significantly different frequencies.

Shouldn’t we treat them different?
Next time more on simple and not so simple grouping.

Well, let me see ..
There are 481 participants of 124 universities from 34 countries (Apr. 20, 2007).
480 brilliant people to compete with

Last year, when I participated for the first time in this Cup, I didn’t know much about Data Mining and had to learn everything in about 6 weeks. It was damn interesting but also a pain in the ass.

This year I am participating again with a lot of joy. However, the data seems to be very boring at a first glance. Let’s start here to investigate the data and look what’s inside the rusty dusty data mine. May be one of us will find the gold vein.

This is the Data Mining Blog for more information on the current investigation.