DM: "Keys to the Commercial Success of Data Mining" Workshop

[Kurt Thearling]

A web site collecting the papers and presentations from the KDD'98 
workshop
"Keys to the Commercial Success of Data Mining" is now available on 
the web
at http://www.santafe.edu/~kurt/workshop.shtml.   This workshop 
brought
together a diverse group of developers, users, and integrators of 
business
data mining applications. Five formal presentations were combined 
with two
panel sessions a lot of discussion to produce a very interesting 
meeting.

Summary:

Data mining is on the cusp of true commercial success. Commercial
institutions are starting to move beyond pilot studies and research 
programs
toward the production use of predictive models for real world business
applications. While this is exciting, it is also where it gets harder.

Successful data mining in business doesn't come down to simply having 
a hot
algorithm and giving it to an experienced modeler. Business users 
care about
things such as database support, application integration, business
templates, flexibility, scalability, real profitability, and other 
issues
that have not historically been the concern of the KDD community. 

>From a development point of view, the core algorithms are now a 
>small part,
perhaps 10%, of the overall data mining application, which itself is 
only
10% of the business process that contains the application. This 
workshop
focused on the remaining 99% so that commercial data mining 
applications are
relevant to business users.

- kurt

Kurt Thearling
Director of Analytics
Exchange Applications
http://www.thearling.com