Abstract
Data-mining technology delivers two key benefits: (i) a descriptive function, enabling enterprises, regardless of industry or size, in the context of defined business objectives, to automatically explore, visualize, and understand their data and to identify patterns, relationships, and dependencies that impact business outcomes (i.e., revenue growth, profit improvement, cost containment, and risk management); (ii) a predictive function, enabling relationships uncovered and identified through the data-mining process to be expressed as business rules or predictive models. These outputs can be communicated in traditional reporting formats (i.e., presentations, briefs, electronic information sharing) to guide business planning and strategy. Also, these outputs, expressed as programming code, can be deployed or hard wired into business-operating systems to generate predictions of future outcomes, based on newly generated data, with higher accuracy and certainty.