Data Mining, Down Under » Australia

Reducing Churn Through Social Network Analysis

Shane Butler — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 09:33:16 +0000

Earlier in the month local data miner Tim Manns presented at the Sydney Data Miners group. Tim spoke on some work been doing at Optus around using mobile call patterns to establish social networks and using these networks to reduce customer churn. Interestingly, there are also applications in many other areas, including data cleansing, for example, where one person has purchased two mobile phones and given one to their spouse or child. Using this analysis we can try to determine which account is likely to be the actual account holder and infer the details (such as age) of the other customer.

For a full write up of Tim’s work, check out James Taylor’s PAW 2009 summary or head over to Tim’s data mining blog.

AusDM 09 & Analytic Challenge

Shane Butler — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:47:52 +0000

Australian Data Mining conference (AusDM09) will be held in Melbourne next December and Dr Phil Brierley of Tiberius Data Mining has put out the call for proposals for an analytic challenge to accompany the conference. Competitions are quite popular in data mining circles and provide a good training ground for new practitioners to get access to real data and solve real problems. They also often have surprising results, such as the team who used laptop with 2GB RAM to beat IBM’s mighty clusters.

For businesses, this is a great opportunity to find out what is available by having others suggest new ideas and methods, or even to test your internally deployed models against the best of the best. So if you’re a business who has data, please consider being invloved! For further details, see the competition webpage.

SAS Forum (Australia) presentations available online

Shane Butler — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 23:30:52 +0000

The SAS Forum (Australia) was held in Sydney back in August. I was unable to attend but luckily the presentations have been put online. Here are some that I found interesting:

Make Sure Your Insight is Insightful: Analytical Marketing at NAB by Antony Ugoni (National Australia Bank)
Model Deployment and Management – The ATO Story by Warwick Graco (Australian Taxation Office)
Putting Cheques in Place to Identify Fraud by Dr Paul Bracewell (Offlode NZ) and Flavio Palaci (Marsh Australia)
Customer Value Creation Using Analytics by Arun VS (Satyam)
Analysing Performance and Tuning your SAS Application by Bill Gibson (SAS)

Profiling Amazon Users

Shane Butler — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 05:57:30 +0000

Here’s an interesting read. Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists takes a look at just how much information we can extract from publicly available data such as Amazon.com’s Wish List service. The wish list allows a user to bookmark items they would like either by coming back and purchase at a later date or telling people about as gift ideas. Thus it was the ideal database to extract amazon user’s political interests. More and More, the term data mining seems to be used in the USA to refer to privacy concerns of a government tool for spying on it’s citizens. That’s certainly the tone this article takes but it is still interesting to see what can be achieved using freely available data.

Searching on political and religious keywords the author generated a list of users and the books interested in. Although the user’s address information is hidden, he was able to use Yahoo! People Search to find their location and display the highlighted users on a customized Google Map. Anyway, its worth the read, so check it out.