IT Alevel 12.2

Question 1

What is meant by data mining?

Answer 1

The proccess of analyzing large quantity of information. Used to show patterns and trends.

Question 2

Explain how the information obtained by data mining can be used by owers of a retail store to increase profits.

Answer 2

• Divide customers into groups according to purchasing habits
• Can decide when to put items on sale/at full price
• Can target specific customers/customer groupings from customers purchasing habits via social media/email marketing
• Can target specific customers/customer groupings from loyalty card schemes via social media/email marketing
• Can decide which advertising campaigns worked/which did not
• Can decide which items sold well to different demographics/which did not.

Question 3

Describe the tasks that occur in Data mining phase of ‘Data Understanding/ data modelling’.

Answer 3

• Gathering the data required for the phase
• Documenting/describing the data e.g. location of source/how acquired
• Listing the source of the data that has been gathered
• Reviewing/exploring the data to check for e.g. completeness/anomalies/outliers
• Verifying the quality of the data that has been gathered.

Question 4

Describe the tasks that occur in Data mining phase of ‘Deployment’.

Answer 4

• Planning how the data mining results will be used/reported
• Creating a plan to monitor/maintain the model to ensure it remains valid/useful
• Reporting the final results of the data mining process
• Reviewing the final results of the data mining process to check for errors and how to correct them.

Question 5

Describe the tasks that occur in Data mining phase of ‘business understanding’.

Answer 5

• Identifying the business goals and their impact on the business/organisation
• Assessing the situation/problem that is to be solved by/what is required from the data mining
• Defining the goals of the data mining process and producing a project plan.

Question 6

Explain why health care organisations use data mining to analyse their patients data.

Answer 6

• Identify patterns in large sets of data
• Data patterns help to determine/predict trends in information
• Compare and contrast symptoms to analyse disease causes/processes
• Determine the effectiveness of treatments/drugs for
  illnesses to determine most effective course of treatment/medicines/actions
• Determine (normal) patterns of medical claims by
  patients/doctors/clinics/hospitals to help reduce costs
• Determine abnormal/unusual patterns of medical claims by
  patients/doctors/clinics/hospitals to identify fraudulent claims.

Question 7

Discuss the benefits and drawbacks of use of data mining by businesses.

Answer 7

• Data mining analyses a vast amount of data from numerous source
• to discover trends/relationships/links between data that are not
  (immediately) obvious
• to increase quality/reduce errors/defects in their processes
• Personal privacy issues of extracting data from internet activities/social
  networks/e-commerce/forums/blogs concerns the public
• Businesses may lose control of their customer data when it
  is used for data mining and may be/could be responsible for resulting any data loss/breach
• Customers data must be kept secure during the data mining process, because any data loss will result in costs to the business/legal liability for the business.