Publications

DM Direct Special Report, March 21, 2006, By Robert A. Nisbet

Part I and Part II of this series presented the proper business and knowledge management context in which to evaluate data mining tools. In this article, I will evaluate six data mining tools for CRM data mining according to capabilities drawn from that context. The usual approach to evaluating data mining tools is to compare them according to various model performance criteria. This evaluation will take a different path - analysis of the ability of each tool to facilitate the data mining process for various customer relationship management (CRM) models for retention, cross-sell/up-sell and customer acquisition.

Performance comparisons among data mining tools may lead evaluators astray; they speak only to the relative ability of the algorithm to build a model with the data input to it. But, where does the data come from?

Here is the rest of the story.