How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did. Target has got you in its aim Every time you go shopping, you share intimate details about your consumption patterns with retailers.
And many of those retailers are studying those details to figure out what you like, what you need, and which coupons are most likely to make you happy. Target, for example, has figured out how to data-mine its way into your womb, to figure out whether you have a baby on the way long before you need to start buying diapers. Charles Duhigg outlines in the New York Times how Target tries to hook parents-to-be at that crucial moment before they turn into rampant — and loyal — buyers of all things pastel, plastic, and miniature. He talked to Target statistician Andrew Pole — before Target freaked out and cut off all communications — about the clues to a customer’s impending bundle of joy.
[Pole] ran test after test, analyzing the data, and before long some useful patterns emerged. Or have a rather nasty infection… Target knows before it shows. Bold is mine. How data mining leads to loans for the underbanked - How data mining leads to loans for the underbanked. While Big Data is increasingly a passion of forward-thinking companies looking to extract value from a growing pile of information, it is also having an effect on some of the most vulnerable consumers, who are finding a way to secure loans thanks to data mining.
That’s through the work of ZestCash, a next generation loan service, that has been applying data creatively to bring loans to consumers who have few choices beyond payday loans. (c) 2012 Pinar Ozger. pinar@pinarozger.com ZestCash CEO and founder Douglas Merrill, who formerly served as CIO at Google appeared at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference to talk about how ZestCash uses a wide array of data to help qualify people for short term loans. The company, which launched in 2010 and raised $19 million last year, has been giving $300 to $800 loans to users based on thousands of variables, which are boiled down to 10 models.
Watch the livestream of Structure:Data here. Microsoft Makes Data Mining Personal - Tech Europe. By Nick Clayton The idea of “data mining” has become quite closely associated with the idea of companies such as Facebook or Google sifting through vast quantities of data, generally to find some sort of purchasing sentiment.
Microsoft has created a project which uses similar methods but in a way that is rather more personal, smaller scale and local. The Technology Review published by MIT explains: Software called Lifebrowser processes photos, e-mails, Web browsing history, calendar events, and other documents stored on a person’s computer and identifies landmark events. Its timeline interface can explore, search, and discover those landmarks as a kind of memory aid. Technology Review: Microsoft Builds a Browser for Your Past. Data Mining: What is Data Mining? Overview Generally, data mining (sometimes called data or knowledge discovery) is the process of analyzing data from different perspectives and summarizing it into useful information - information that can be used to increase revenue, cuts costs, or both.
Data mining software is one of a number of analytical tools for analyzing data. It allows users to analyze data from many different dimensions or angles, categorize it, and summarize the relationships identified. Technically, data mining is the process of finding correlations or patterns among dozens of fields in large relational databases. Continuous Innovation Although data mining is a relatively new term, the technology is not. Example For example, one Midwest grocery chain used the data mining capacity of Oracle software to analyze local buying patterns. Data, Information, and Knowledge Data Data are any facts, numbers, or text that can be processed by a computer. Information Knowledge Data Warehouses What can data mining do? Data mining hot topic at tech expo; Execs learn benefits of emerging technology - Avionics Intelligence.