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.

Our new seminar “Second Life” does not only cover the homonymous online game but gives the attendees a glance at all aspects of virtual reality and virtual life in its current state of the art. The very first assignment led me to write this (kind of) poem.
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Sometimes it does pay off to visit some boring lectures. There you have alot of time to think of great ideas. Todays boring lecture resulted in a very amusing google-trends query.

Google trends for “uni” and “sex” in Germany

Pay attention to the peaks and anti-peaks around the new year. There is defintely a negative correlation between the number of searchqueries for “Sex” and “Uni” (Abbreviation for University)