Features

Data mining experts and statisticians from more than 14 countries gathered at SAS on October 22nd and 23rd for the M2002 data mining technology conference. Widely renowned data mining experts highlighted creative and effective approaches that addressed a range of important issues and problems in banking, retail, education and other areas.

Keynote speakers were featured both days. Robert Blattberg, distinguished Professor of Marketing at Northwestern University, delivered a compelling talk on �The Brave New World of Marketing,� addressing large-scale modeling in retail using POS and other data. Professor Foster Provost of New York University�s Stern School of Business presented interesting findings on sampling, tree-based models and logistic regression. Ed Wegmann, distinguished Professor and Director for the Center of Computational Statistics at George Mason University, presented highly interactive visual data mining capabilities. Gordon Linoff, principal and co-founder of Data Miners, focused on connecting the data to the business, touching on many practical considerations of real-world data mining.

The six tracks provided a wealth of knowledge in the form of case studies, best practices, lessons learned, panel discussions and creative approaches to challenging problems in a number of industries and application areas. Yoav Freund, leading expert in machine learning, discussed computational and statistical issues in data mining, touching on large-scale classification problems, generative versus descriptive modeling and boosting. Bill MacReady of NASA discussed applications of optimization to data mining. Alan Montgomery, Carnegie Mellon Professor of Marketing, spoke about internet marketing and web mining with special emphasis on user profiling, path analysis and text classification.

M2002 was sold out weeks before the conference dates, so watch out for next year�s sixth annual SAS data mining conference. M2003 will be co-chaired by Professor Jaideep Srivastiva of the University of Minnesota and Terry Woodfield, Ph.D. at SAS.