Publications

Datamation (Nov 6, 2002) published an interview with Usama Fayyad.

Usama is a data mining pioneer who began working in the field in 1989. He got his start at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, compiling data on astronomical phenomena such as volcanoes, star systems, etc. From there, he went on to work for Microsoft research and then, frustrated by problems he was seeing in the data mining industry, he left Microsoft and started digiMine to deal with the issues of data mining and data warehousing. In this article, he shares his thoughts about the industry and how to get the most out of your data.

"There are two sides to data mining, descriptive and predictive," says Dr. Fayyad. "Descriptive data mining reorganizes the data, digging deeper into it and pulling out patterns, such as customer similarity, which allows you to create a short description about that group of customers.

Here is the full story.