Read: Re: DM: Queries...

[durpani]

As to the data warehouse question:

Data warehouses (at least as originally conceived; the term is thrown around quite loosely these days) is not just a historical database but is one that is optimized to support decision making and data analysis (though not necessarily the kind of data discovery involved in data mining).  Data warehouses also organize the data by subject matter.

As to some of the marketing issues and data warehouse:

Ralph Kimball's book "The Data Warehouse Toolkit" (John Wiley & Sons, 1996; ISBN 0-471-15337-0) has information on building data warehouse databases to support standard sales and marketing performance tracking.  I would imagine that some of this information would be relevant to identifying the kinds of data one would need to do project planning and project projections.

I would imagine though that your application would require considerable demographic information, information about similar products (if any) already in the marketplace and the buying patterns and demographics of those product's customers.  This would probably mean that, in addition to the demographics and survey data gathered from a prospective customer survey, you would have to acquire a lot of data from someplace like A.C. Nielsen or one of the other firms that specialize in providing marketing information about products.  I haven't looked there but if Nielsen has a web site you might want to see if they discuss using their supplied data to deal with exactly the kind of problem you are talking about.  Whatever data you would acquire would certainly require a data mining approach to get at what I think you are trying to establish.  The results are out of scope for a traditional data warehouse.

There is also a chapter (17) in the book "Data Warehousing: Strategies, Technologies and Techniques by Rob Mattison (McGraw-Hill, 1996; ISBN 0-07-041034-8) that discusses the use of neural nets for making marketing projections based on demographics and other factors relating to promotions and response to product offers.  The chapter was written by a tool vendor so may need to be taken with a grain or two of salt but it looks like it might be related to your problem.

Chapter 20 of the same book deals with data mining tools that can be used for predicting.  The example is not to your subject matter but may be useful.  It too was written by a vendor (of a different product) so the same caveats apply.

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Subject: DM: Queries...
Author:  Srikanth.Jagannath@blr.sni.de at MAILHUB-SMTP
Date:    8/6/97 3:12 AM
Hello,
     I am really sorry for such a long mail, but I have some queries.

     I have a few queries regarding the application of Data Mining and Data Warehousing. Yesterday I had posted to this group about some practical case studies, and Mr. Dorothy Firsching had responded asking me to have a look at http://www.nautilus-systems.com/. Yep,I had a look at this site, and got some information on applicaiton of Data Mining to the marketing of medicines. Here again it is mentioned that the data was analysed, extracted and from this knowledge was extracted.

     But my quesion is, what sort of data would be helpful for such analysis. Usually, I guess, that such companies perform a market survey by going to the consumers with a questionaire, and they perform analysis on this data obtained from the questionaire. If again such data is gathered and analysis done using this, then what is the need for Data Mining. In the case of Data Mining, I guess, that this information is obtained from the data recorded about each consumer transaction in the database. I have a typical marketing scenario for which I am wondering as to what should be the data that has to be recorded. I would give you a brief of the scenario:

     I have a company providing some service to the customers. The company stores data regarding the customer, the service being provided, customer transactions, billing details, payment details, etc.,. Now my aim is to find the customer base which would respond if the company starts a new service, I would also like to know as to what would be the response for the new service, what new service to start and things like this. For this what special data must be stored in the database.

     Moreover I have been having some conflicting thoughts about Data Warehousing. As far as I perceived Data Warehousing is a data store that stores historic data, and data analysis can be done on this data store. But when I explained this to a lay man, he was asking me as to if this is just the use of Data Warehousing then why do you need one, or why is it being called Data Warehouse, and not just any other database, say Historic Database. I was just wondering on this point.

     Actually all this is happening because I have not had any formal discussion with any experts/researchers in this area. The knowledge that I have gained is by reading research papers. So it would be great if someone gives me an insight into this questions, and also some suggestions on some book/paper that is more explanatory in these aspects.

     Thanks in advance,
regards
-srikanth