The fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a greater danger to the Privacy of the individual.
The advent of computer-based systems and its applications in all walks of human endeavor have produced mountains of data that contain potentially valuable knowledge. Finding nuggets of knowledge in this data is the focus of the rapidly growing field known as Data Mining or Knowledge Discovery in Databases. `Knowledge discovery from databases' is the process of analyzing large amounts of raw data to discover previously unknown and interesting facts about the data. It is an active and growing area in both research and applications.
A
classical example of data mining is its use in retail sales departments. If a
store tracks the purchases of a customer and notices that a customer buys a lot
of silk ties, the data mining system will make a correlation between that customer
and silk ties. The sales department will look at that information and may begin
direct mail marketing of silk ties to that customer, or it may alternatively attempt
to get the customer to buy a wider range of products. In this case, the data mining
system used by the retail store discovered new information about the customer
that was previously unknown to the company. Another widely used hypothetical example
is that of a large North American chain of supermarkets. Through intensive analysis
of the transactions and the goods bought over a period of time, i.e., data mining,
analysts found that beers and diapers were often bought together. Though explaining
this interrelation might be difficult, taking advantage of it, on the other hand,
should not be hard (e.g., placing the high-profit diapers next to the high-profit
beers). This technique is often referred to as `Market Basket Analysis'. |
