Data Mining is Essential to Healthcare

Data Mining has become very popular in the healthcare industry.This is primarily because many healthcare transactions are too complex to be processed by traditional methods and data mining can make these transactions less complex and voluminous. Data mining has been used to detect fraud and abuse and also to manage customer relationships and healthcare. A disadvantage to data accessibility is that since data mining exist in many different forms such as clinics, administration and laboratories data have to be collected way before data mining can be done. Data warehousing can be a soulution to this, but it has its flaws as well. Overall, data mining can be very useful now or even in the near future in the healthcare industry.

Source: http://www.cmio.net/index.php?option=com_articles&view=article&id=31762:jhim-data-mining-beneficial-essential-to-healthcare

How Organizations Decide to Use Data Mining

How to Do Data Mining in the Perfect Manner

An organization's usage of data mining can have a challenging start. The "right" or "wrong" use of data mining tools and practices can greatly impact revenues and costs. This article is saying that data mining use should be determined by taking into account business needs, data, and performance.

If a business is in a high growth stage, it will need to look at potential customers and their preferences. Software that organizes prospect information would be a good choice to help the company. It can also sort the potential customers into groups based on characteristics such as age, location, and personal interests. If a company already has the data it requires to be profitable, data mining may not be necessary. If a company is experiencing declines in sales, data mining can be used to determine solutions for how to retain customers. To conclude, organizations make decisions on how to use data mining based on needs, performance, and availability of data.

Data mining gone wrong... well tampered with anyway

Source:http://datamining.typepad.com/data_mining/2011/04/when-data-mining-goes-horribly-wrong.html

This article shows one of the fatal flaws with data mining if the processes for the computer to follow have been too widely defined or just told to collect and combine what data it relevant but not checking for relevancy. In this article Google made a mistake in the programming they used to mine for data in a social site called West Seattle Blog. The program started to combine information about different places and comments about these places because for the similarity of the names. This lead to conflicting comments like,"the Chinese food is great," and ," the PI moron strikes again," which are comment about two different places but posted on a bowling alleys comment page. Also the Seattle PI which is a local newspaper which has a link on the Google supported blog has been rerouted to display a page about a west Seattle killer responsible for slayings in Seattle having mental problems instead of the homepage of the newspaper. Google has to get on this problem and rectify the issues in their programming or it could get ugly. 

Companies' Use of Blog Posts

Realities of Social Media Data Mining

People who post entries on social networking sites are often unaware of how this information may be used by companies. Oftentimes, users of social networking sites feel the need to broadcast everything that happens to them. Some users feel safer by having a private profile. Despite having a "private profile", companies can still show advertisements on users' Facebook pages. This is quite an improvement from companies asking customers to fill out surveys on paper or giving surveys on the phone. Even with a private profile, a user will still "like" companies' Facebook pages and leave comments on these pages. The reason for this is by posting information to public pages, it gives the companies the right to use your information. Once companies receive information from users, they may use this information to increase revenues.