Measuring and managing return on marketing investment, that’s the promise of the book from Guy R. Powell. A famous quote in marketing is : Half of my advertising is wasted; I just don’t know which half (John Wannamacher). Indeed, how many marketing initiative are rigorously evaluated? No doubt price cuts increase volumes, but how often does it to improve the top line, not even talking about the bottom line. This book is about putting some analytics in marketing and knowing the truth.
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Programming Collective Intelligence is a great book. It covers most of the existing data mining algorithms and presents many applications for them. It covers clustering (k-means, hierarchical), supervised classification (k-nearest neighbours, Naïve Bayes, decision trees, SVM), data analysis (non negative matrix factorization), optimisation (hill climbing, simulated annealing and genetic algorithms) and end with genetic programming. Along the way, it present application like spam detection, pricing, recommendation, … If you want to start in data mining this is a very good way. 0
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Actionable Web Analytics : Using Data to Make Smart Business Decisions is a marketing book like Competing on Analytics. A lot of sentences to say simple things. Here there is even sometimes copy and pastes. Nevertheless, this kind of book are sometimes interesting. This one is to some extends.
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Competing on Analytics : A new Science of Winning is an interesting book even if it doesn’t explain anything about how to do real analytics. It’s just not the point. It’s objective is to give you some insight on why and how you need to move your business in a more analytical way.
The book is full of real analytics examples. For instance, baseball teams use analytics to manage their team composition. You don’t need to have the best players, you need to hire good player with a cheap salary in order to maximize your profit.
The book gives you ideas on how you can use analytics in the different fields of a company : financial, manufacturing, R&D, Human resources, CRM and suppliers. I know how to do analytics and data mining, but how to apply it to business processes is more tricky. At the end, nobody cares about the validity of yours models if they don’t earn any dollar. This book is about that, showing why and how you could make more money using analytics.
Last book I read was Collective Intelligence in Action from Satman Alag (ed. Manning). It covers data mining from a web 2.0 related view. Data is generated by users in many form (ratings, tags, blogs, web pages, …). Such data are not well defined. An user can create a new tag like gloupy without giving you the meaning. There is also some text mining issues. How to understand the meaning of a sentences?
The book is divided in three parts. First (half of the book) describe data and more especially how to get them (web crawling, blog trackers). The second part is about exploiting the data, i.e. data mining (clustering and prediction). There is also a chapter on converting text into tokens. The last part is on examples of applications. Making an intelligent search engine or a recommendation engine (with an interesting discussion on Amazon, Google News and Netflix solutions).
Being based on Java code, it relies upon some libraries like Nutch for web crawling, Lucene for text handling and Weka for the data mining. I think there is too much java code in the book. Indeed, it’s boring an you skip easily some pages. For instance, the book use kmeans with self made code, Weka code and JDM (an data mining java api) code. It seems quite useless to see three times the same thing.
Nevertheless, I have found this book very interesting and a very good introduction to web mining, an area where I have little knowledge of.