Assignment: Data Mining

The development of complex algorithms that can mine mounds of data that have been collected from people and digital devices have led to the adoption of data mining by most businesses as a means of understanding their customers better than before. Data mining takes place in retailing and sales, banking, education, manufacturing and production, health care, insurance, broadcasting, marketing, customer services, and a number of other areas. The analytical information gathered by data-mining applications has given some businesses a competitive advantage, an ability to make informed decisions, and better ways to predict the behavior of customers. Write a four to five (4-5) page paper in which you:

1. Determine the benefits of data mining to the businesses when employing:
   1. Predictive analytics to understand the behavior of customers
   2. Associations discovery in products sold to customers
   3. Web mining to discover business intelligence from Web customers
   4. Clustering to find related customer information
2. Assess the reliability of the data mining algorithms. Decide if they can be trusted and predict the errors they are likely to produce.
3. Analyze privacy concerns raised by the collection of personal data for mining purposes.
   1. Choose and describe three (3) concerns raised by consumers.
   2. Decide if each of these concerns is valid and explain your decision for each.
   3. Describe how each concern is being allayed.
4. Provide at least three (3) examples where businesses have used predictive analysis to gain a competitive advantage and evaluate the effectiveness of each business's strategy.
5. Use at least three (3) quality resources in this assignment. Note: Wikipedia and similar Websites do not qualify as quality resources.