Data mining is gaining momentum these days. Through this course, you are able to develop an understanding of the strengths and limitations of popular data mining techniques and to be able to identify promising business applications of data mining. Students will be able to actively manage and participate in data mining projects executed by consultants or specialists in data mining. A useful takeaway from the course will be the ability to perform powerful data analysis in Excel.

Data that has relevance for managerial decisions is accumulating at an incredible rate due to a host of technological advances. Electronic data capture has become inexpensive and ubiquitous as a by-product of innovations such as the internet, e-commerce, electronic banking, point-of-sale devices, bar-code readers, and intelligent machines. Such data is often stored in data warehouses and data marts specifically intended for management decision support. Data mining is a rapidly growing field that is concerned with developing techniques to assist managers to make intelligent use of these repositories. A number of successful applications have been reported in areas such as credit rating, fraud detection, database marketing, customer relationship management, and stock market investments. This course will examine methods that have emerged from both fields and proven to be of value in recognizing patterns and making predictions from an applications perspective. We will survey applications and provide an opportunity for hands-on experimentation with algorithms for data mining using easy-to-use software and cases.

Nitin Patel is a recognized expert on the development of fast and accurate computer algorithms to implement computationally intensive statistical methods. He has published over sixty-five refereed papers in the areas of statistics, operations research and computing and co-authored a book on data mining for end-users. Dr. Patel is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. Along with Dr. Cyrus Mehta and Dr. Karim Hirji, he received the 1987 George W.Snedecor Award from the American Statistical Association. Dr. Patel has been a visiting professor at MIT since 1995. Previously, he was CMC chair professor at the Indian Institute of Management, and held visiting positions at Harvard, the University of Michigan, the University of Montreal and the University of Pittsburgh. He was a co-founder of Tata Consultancy Services, a leading Indian software company and is a Fellow of the Computer Society of India.