Democratizing Data Mining - A Radical Approach to Pervasive Predictive Analytics

The area of incorporating predictive analytics into operational processes has, for the most part, relied on "Industrial Strength" data mining and knowledge discovery products employed by expert analysts with deep backgrounds in statistics and probability. These analysts not only understand the approaches employed by the analysis tools, but are also experts in designing, building, and refining analytical models. As subject matter experts, these professional data miners have been able to add significant value to business operations, but only as long as they are fully integrated in the loop. While this top-down approach yields valuable insight, it is limited in scalability due to the costs of the industrial strength tools as well as the bandwidth of the experts available to perform the analysis.