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Data Mining Techniques and Tools

There are a wide variety of tools for data mining. The decision about which technique to use depends on the type of data and the type of questions that managers want answered by that data. Many commercial data mining software packages include more than one data mining tool. A summer 2000 Kdnuggets.com poll indicated SPSS’s (spss.com) Clementine is the most used data mining software package. It is targeted to business users and it is a visual rapid modeling environment. Advanced sources of information on data mining tools include Berry and Linoff (1997) and Dhar and Stein (1997). This section examines five common categories for data mining tools: Case-Based Reasoning, Data Visualization, Fuzzy Query and Analysis, Genetic Algorithms, and Neural Networks (cf., Greenfield, 1999).