Ubiquitous And Invisible Data Mining

While you are viewing the results of your Google query, various ads pop up relating to your query. Google’s strategy of tailoring advertising to match the user’s interests is successful—it has increased the clicks for the companies involved by four to five times. This also makes you happier, because you are less likely to be pestered with irrelevant ads. Google was named a top-10 advertising venue by Media Power 50.

Web-wide tracking is a technology that tracks a user across each site she visits. So, while surfing the Web, information about every site you visit may be recorded, which can provide marketers with information reflecting your interests, lifestyle, and habits. Double Click Inc.’s DART ad management technology uses Web-wide tracking to target advertising based on behavioral or demographic attributes. Companies pay to use Double Click’s service on their websites. The click stream data from all of the sites using Double Click are pooled and analyzed for profile information regarding users who visit any of these sites. Double Click can then tailor advertisements to end users on behalf of its clients. In general, customer-tailored advertisements are not limited to ads placed on Web stores or company mail-outs. In the future, digital television and on-line books and newspapers may also provide advertisements that are designed and selected specifically for the given viewer or viewer group based on customer profiling information and demographics.

While you’re using the computer, you remember to go to eBay (www.ebay.com) to see how the bidding is coming along for some items you had posted earlier this week. You are pleased with the bids made so far, implicitly assuming that they are authentic. Luckily, eBay now uses data mining to distinguish fraudulent bids from real ones.

As we have seen throughout this book, data mining and OLAP technologies can help us in our work in many ways. Business analysts, scientists, and governments can all use data mining to analyze and gain insight into their data. They may use data mining and OLAP tools, without needing to know the details of any of the underlying algorithms. All that matters to the user is the end result returned by such systems, which they can then process or use for their decision making.

Data mining can also influence our leisure time involving dining and entertainment. Suppose that, on the way home from work, you stop for some fast food. A major fast food restaurant used data mining to understand customer behavior via market-basket and time-series analyses. Consequently, a campaign was launched to convert “drinkers” to “eaters” by offering hamburger-drink combinations for little more than the price of the drink alone. That’s food for thought, the next time you order a meal combo. With a little help from data mining, it is possible that the restaurant may even know what you want to order before you reach the counter. Bob, an automated fast-food restaurant management system developed by Hyper Active Technologies, Predicts what people are likely to order based on the type of car they drive to the restaurant, and on their height. For example, if a pick-up truck pulls up, the customer is likely to order a quarter pounder. A family car is likely to include children, which means chicken nuggets and fries. The idea is to advise the chefs of the right food to cook for incoming customers to provide faster service, better-quality food, and reduce food wastage.

After eating, you decide to spend the evening at home relaxing on the couch. Blockbuster (www.blockbuster.com) uses collaborative recommender systems to suggest movie rentals to individual customers. Other movie recommender systems available on the Internet include Movie Lens (www.movielens.umn.edu) and Netflix (www.netflix.com). (There are even recommender systems for restaurants, music, and books that are not specifically tied to any company.) Or perhaps you may prefer to watch television instead. NBC uses data mining to profile the audiences of each show. The information gleaned contributes toward NBC’s programming decisions and advertising. Therefore, the time and day of week of your favorite show may be determined by data mining.

Finally, data mining can contribute toward our health and well-being. Several pharmaceutical companies use data mining software to analyze data when developing drugs and to find associations between patients, drugs, and outcomes. It is also being used to detect beneficial side effects of drugs. The hair-loss pill Propecia, for example, was first developed to treat prostrate enlargement. Data mining performed on a study of patients found that it also promoted hair growth on the scalp. Data mining can also be used to keep our streets safe. The data mining system Clementine from SPSS is being used by police departments to identify key patterns in crime data. It has also been used by police to detect unsolved crimes that may have been committed by the same criminal.