DM: RE: data mining skeptics

[Wiertz, Martijn]

I guess it depends on how you explain data mining.

If you tell people data mining is about high-paid consultants doing magical things with revolutionary back-propagating multi-layer perceptron neural networks on their multi-terabyte data warehouse, running on a massive parallelized supercomputer, go figure...

If you tell it's about learning from experience and that this experience is available in two forms: their heads and their databases and that they should combine what they already know with what they learn from their data, I guess it makes a lot more sense.

But then again, that kind of takes the fun out of the field of AI and machine learning, doens't it.. ;-)

cheers

Martijn Wiertz
SPSS Benelux


-----Original Message-----
From: Tjen-Sien Lim [SMTP:limt@stat.wisc.edu]
Sent: Saturday, August 14, 1999 7:07 PM
To: datamine-l
Subject: DM: data mining skeptics

I'm wondering what you'd say to people who are skeptical or even 
cynical   
toward data mining. I've just met people who really dislike data 
mining   
and predict that the entire field won't last long. Since they're 
beyond   
my league, I couldn't convince them that data mining is a real field 
and   
won't vanish. Thanks.

--
Tjen-Sien Lim                (608) 262-8181 (Voice)
Dept. of Statistics          (209) 882-7914 (Fax)
Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison   limt@stat.wisc.edu
1210 West Dayton Street      http://www.stat.wisc.edu/~limt
Madison, WI 53706


P.S. My apology if this is a stupid question.