Features

While CRM was the top data mining application area in 2006 (with 39% of respondents), the fastest growing application area was web mining.

The previous KDnuggets Poll asked readers to choose
Industries/fields where you applied data mining in the past 12 months

The 3 leading application areas were

• CRM (with 39% of respondents)
• Fraud Detection
• and Direct Marketing/ Fundraising.

We also compared the results to similar polls in the past, and the area with highest growth is
e-commerce and web mining (see more below).

Among non-traditional and novel applications, there were suggestions of social policy studies and financial / lending (although partly covered by CRM and Credit Scoring).

Oren Etzioni wrote about Farecast.com, which uses data mining to make airfare predictions (the first and only airfare prediction site on the Web) - see elsewhere in this issue.

We then compared the results to 2004 KDnuggets Poll Industries/fields where you currently apply data mining

and 2003 KDnuggets Poll Industries/fields where you currently apply data mining.

Since there were more categories in 2006, we combined 2006 categories of e-commerce, web content mining, and web usage categories into one category e-commerce/web;
Security / Anti-terrorism and Government / Military into another category;
and Banking and Credit Scoring into a third category. This allows us to compare the 2006 results to 2004 and 2003 findings.

We also re-computed percentages for 2004 and 2003 polls relative to the number of voters (instead of the number of votes).

The results are shown in the following table, with Growth computed as the difference between Y06 value and the average of Y04 and Y03 values.

Field	Y03	Y04	Y06	Growth	Trend
e-commerce & Web mining	11%	14%	30%	137%	up
Security / Anti-terrorism & Government /Military	4.6%	9.3%	11%	58%	up
Travel/Hospitality	3.8%	2.3%	4.5%	47%	up
Investment / Stocks	6.1%	10%	10%	21%	~
Fraud Detection	18%	22%	22%	8%	~
Direct Marketing/ Fundraising	22%	22%	20%	-9%	~
Manufacturing	3.8%	10%	6.4%	-10%	~
Other	9.2%	22%	14%	-13%	~
Retail	13%	10%	10%	-15%	~
Telecom	16%	14%	13%	-15%	~
Biotech/Genomics	21%	21%	16%	-25%	down
Banking / Credit Scoring	28%	34%	20%	-35%	down
Insurance	18%	17%	11%	-38%	down
Science	18%	23%	11%	-47%	down
Medical/ Pharma	12%	17%	7.3%	-51%	down

Not surprisingly, e-commerce and web applications are up, followed by security / anti-terrorism applications.

What is interesting is the decline in popularity among more traditional applications, like Banking / Credit Scoring and Insurance. Also, note the decline in popularity of Biotech/genomics and Medical / Pharma applications.

Note: we did not compare this poll to 2005 KDnuggets Poll Industries/fields where you successfully applied data mining in the past 3 years since the questions were sufficiently different.