Data Mining, Down Under

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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The DMG has released a new version of the PMML open format for representing predictive models. The new version includes support for ensembles, new model types and more built in functions to name just a few of the enhancements. For a detailed summary, see the Zementis blog.

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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 [...]

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Thomas A. Rathburn has written a series of three articles on data mining the financial markets. Rathburn takes a detailed look into the success and failures of his efforts in the markets and with 10 year US bonds in particular. You can check it out here part 1, part 2, and part 3. [...]

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Tim O’Reilly points to the news that Experian has made a significant move to improve the quality of their online and demographic data with the acqusition of Hitwise for US$240 Million. Hitwise collects user traffic from ISPs in several countries including Australia and uses that information to provide companies with insight into their online [...]

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From the ComputerWorld article:
Private health insurer HCF has implemented a predictive analytics suite to help weed out fraudulent claims, target individual members and streamline the monotonous labour of data analysis.

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You may have listened to Internet radio before, but Pandora is a station of a different kind – totally personalised. Its a Flash based player that sits inside your browser, so no problems with firewalls. But the real innovation is that when you start it up, you tell it the artists you like, and it [...]

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Looks like I missed this one back in December, but Revenue Science (formerly digiMine) has gained an additional USD$25 Million in VC funding. This brings total funding to $70 Million. digiMine was co-founded in 2000 by Usama Fayyad. Later the the consulting arm was spun off as the DMX Group and the company renamed to [...]

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A new service has just launched in the U.S. that allows people to quickly and easily get a estimate of the value of any house in the country. Taking in moutains of data the website predicts the value based on tax record and historical data. While not a official valuation, it is a free service [...]

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