A Critical Overview of Data Mining for Business Applications

Everybody looks to a world that does not remain the same. Furthermore no one can deny that the world is changing, and changing very fast. Technology, education, science, environment, health, communicating habits, entertainment, eating habits, dress - there is hardly anything in life that is not changing. Some changes we like, while others create fear and anxiety around us. Everywhere there is a feeling of insecurity. What will happen to us tomorrow, or what will happen to our children, are questions we keep frequently asking. One thing, however, is clear. It is no more possible to live in the way we have been living so far. It seems that now the entire fabric of life will have to be changed. Life will have to be redesigned. The life of the individual, the social structure, the working conditions and governance all will have to be re-planned. Furthermore over the past 2-3 decades there has been a huge increase in the amount of data being stored in databases as well as the number of database applications in business and the scientific domain. This explosion in the amount of electronically stored data was accelerated by the success of the relational model for storing data and the development and maturing of data retrieval and manipulation technologies. While technology for storing the data developed fast to keep up with the demand, little stress was paid to developing software for analysing the data until recently when companies realized that hidden within these masses of data was a resource that was being ignored. The huge amounts of stored data contains knowledge on a good number of aspects of their business waiting to be harnessed and used for more effective business decision support. Database Management Systems (DMS) used to manage these data sets at present only allow the user to access information explicitly present in the databases i.e. the data. The data stored in the database is only a small part of the \u27iceberg of information\u27 available from it. Contained implicitly within this data is knowledge about a number of aspects of their business waiting to be harnessed and used for more effective business decision support. This extraction of knowledge from large data sets is called Data Mining or Knowledge Discovery in Databases and is defined as the non-trivial extraction of implicit, previously unknown and potentially useful information from data. Almost in parallel with the developments in the database field, machine learning research was maturing with the development of a number of sophisticated techniques based on different models of human learning. Learning by example, cased-based reasoning, learning by observation and neural networks are some of the most popular learning techniques that were being used to create the ultimate thinking machine

Exploring fish purchasing behaviour using data analytics

Nas últimas décadas têm ocorrido mudanças significativas no setor do retalho resultantes da globalização, do aumento de competitividade e da transformação do comportamento de compra do consumidor. Esta mudança de paradigma também se aplica ao setor do peixe fresco, que tem sido alvo do interesse de investigadores internacionais por razões políticas e económicas. Tendo em conta este ambiente competitivo, que valoriza a qualidade e o serviço fornecido ao consumidor assente em custos aceitáveis, é necessário a adoção de estratégias focadas no cliente. Esta dissertação está integrada no projeto ValorMar, que nasceu do compromisso de um conjunto alargado de entidades, desde empresas até centros de investigação posicionados pela relevância da economia marítima na cadeia de valor do pescado. Assim, esta dissertação irá tentar compreender relações que se revelem críticas para a tomada de decisão dos consumidores no momento de compra de peixe fresco. Para tal, irão ser usados dados transacionais e técnicas de data mining adequadas ao problema.A metodologia proposta por esta dissertação tem como objetivo não só a identificação de clientes recorrendo a técnicas de segmentação, mas também uma análise ao carrinho de compras de um cliente de peixe fresco. Estas análises aos dados irão mostrar que a extração de conhecimento de grandes bases de dados permite melhorar as decisões estratégicas das empresas e a sua relação com os clientes.In the last decades there have been significant changes in the retail sector resulting from globalization, the increased competitiveness and transformation on consumer's purchasing behaviour. This paradigm shift also applies to the fish sector, that has been capturing the interest of researchers internationally for political and economic reasons. Taking this competitive environment into account, which values the quality and the service given to the customer based on acceptable costs, it is necessary to adopt customer focused strategies.This thesis is integrated in the ValorMar's project, which was born from the commitment of a broad spectrum of entities, from companies to research centers, positioned by the relevance of the sea economy in the fishery value chain. Thus, this dissertation will try to understand critical relations for the decision making of customers when buying fresh fish.For this, transactional data and data mining techniques appropriate to the problem will be used.The methodology proposed by this thesis aims not only to identify customers using clustering techniques, but also to analyze the market basket of a fresh fish customer. These data analyzis will show that the knowledge extraction from large databases allows to improve the companies strategic decisions and their relationship with customers

Core, Periphery, Exchange Rate Regimes, and Globalization

In this paper we focus on the different historical regime experiences of the core and the periphery. Before 1914 advanced countries adhered to gold while periphery countries either emulated the advanced countries or floated. Some peripheral countries were especially vulnerable to financial crises and debt default in large part because of their extensive external debt obligations denominated in core country currencies. This left them with the difficult choice of floating but restricting external borrowing or devoting considerable resources to maintaining an extra hard peg. Today while advanced countries can successfully float, emergers who are less financially mature and must borrow abroad in terms of advanced country currencies, are afraid to float for the same reason as their nineteenth century forbearers. To obtain access to foreign capital they may need a hard peg to the core country currencies. Thus the key distinction between core and periphery countries both then and now that we emphasize in this paper is financial maturity, evidenced in the ability to issue international securities denominated in domestic currency. Evidence in Section 2 from Feldstein-Horioka tests 1880-1997 agrees with the 'Folk' wisdom that financial integration was as high before 1914 as it is today. But the evidence suggests that it was not the exchange rate regime followed that mattered but the presence of capital controls. Moreover the financial integration observed for the recent period is largely an advanced country phenomenon Section 3 lays out the financial maturity hypothesis, presents narrative evidence for the pre-1914 period of the different experiences of the core and peripheral countries in adhering to the gold standard, and documents that for the emerging countries, plus ca change. Finally, Section 4 presents empirical evidence for core and peripheral countries 1880-1913 and today based on traditional money demand regressions suggesting a strong link between financial depth and the exchange rate regime.

Enhancing the Prediction of Missing Targeted Items from the Transactions of Frequent, Known Users

The ability for individual grocery retailers to have a single view of its customers across all of their grocery purchases remains elusive, and is considered the “holy grail” of grocery retailing. This has become increasingly important in recent years, especially in the UK, where competition has intensified, shopping habits and demographics have changed, and price sensitivity has increased. Whilst numerous studies have been conducted on understanding independent items that are frequently bought together, there has been little research conducted on using this knowledge of frequent itemsets to support decision making for targeted promotions. Indeed, having an effective targeted promotions approach may be seen as an outcome of the “holy grail”, as it will allow retailers to promote the right item, to the right customer, using the right incentives to drive up revenue, profitability, and customer share, whilst minimising costs. Given this, the key and original contribution of this study is the development of the market target (mt) model, the clustering approach, and the computer-based algorithm to enhance targeted promotions. Tests conducted on large scale consumer panel data, with over 32000 customers and 51 million individual scanned items per year, show that the mt model and the clustering approach successfully identifies both the best items, and customers to target. Further, the algorithm segregates customers into differing categories of loyalty, in this case it is four, to enable retailers to offer customised incentives schemes to each group, thereby enhancing customer engagement, whilst preventing unnecessary revenue erosion. The proposed model is compared with both a recently published approach, and the cross-sectional shopping patterns of the customers on the consumer scanner panel. Tests show that the proposed approach outperforms the other approach in that it significantly reduces the probability of having “false negatives” and “false positives” in the target customer set. Tests also show that the customer segmentation approach is effective, in that customers who are classed as highly loyal to a grocery retailer, are indeed loyal, whilst those that are classified as “switchers” do indeed have low levels of loyalty to the selected grocery retailer. Applying the mt model to other fields has not only been novel but yielded success. School attendance is improved with the aid of the mt model being applied to attendance data. In this regard, an action research study, involving the proposed mt model and approach, conducted at a local UK primary school, has resulted in the school now meeting the required attendance targets set by the government, and it has halved its persistent absenteeism for the first time in four years. In medicine, the mt model is seen as a useful tool that could rapidly uncover associations that may lead to new research hypotheses, whilst in crime prevention, the mt value may be used as an effective, tangible, efficiency metric that will lead to enhanced crime prevention outcomes, and support stronger community engagement. Future work includes the development of a software program for improving school attendance that will be offered to all schools, while further progress will be made on demonstrating the effectiveness of the mt value as a tangible crime prevention metric

Market basket analysis : trend analysis of association rules in different time periods

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Statistics and Information Management, specialization in Marketing Research e CRMMarket basket analysis (i.e. Data mining technique in the field of marketing) is the method to find the associations between the items / item sets and based on those associations we can analyze the consumer behavior. In this research we have presented the variability of time, because with the change in time the habits or behavior of the customer also changes. For example, people wear warm clothes in winter and light clothes in summer. Similarly, customers purchase behavior also changes with the change in time. We study the problem of discovering association rules that display regular cyclic variation over time. This problem will allow us to access the changing trends in the purchase behavior of customers in a retail market, and we will be able to analyze the results which will display the changing trends of the association rules. In this research we will study the interaction between association rules and time. We worked on transactional data of a Belgian retail company and analyzed the results which will help the company to build up time period specific marketing strategies, promotional strategies, etc. to increase the profit of their company

Fisheries and Aquaculture and Their Potential Roles in Development: An Assessment of the Current Evidence

Commissioned by the International Sustainability Unity, this report investigates a number of innovative solutions that have been developed to deal with five key challenges that are impeding progress in achieving sustainable fisheries: overcapacity; perverse subsidies; poor governance; lack of data; and by-catch and discards. These key challenges are interlinked and affect the sustainability of fisheries both directly as well as indirectly by undermining instances of good management. Through 22 case studies demonstrating good practice, we explore how these challenges have been addressed around the world and how these approaches might be scaled up and applied in other fisheries. Each case study draws on published material and interviews with key people involved in the fishery. The main report draws lessons from these case studies

Pre-existing fairness concerns restrict the cultural evolution and generalization of inequitable norms in children

Many social exchanges produce benefits that would not exist otherwise, but anticipating conflicts about how to distribute these benefits can derail exchange and destroy the gains. Coordination norms can solve this problem by providing a shared understanding of how to distribute benefits, but such norms can also perpetuate group- level inequality. To examine how inequitable norms evolve culturally and whether they generalize from one setting to another, we conducted an incentivized lab-in-the-field experiment among kindergarten (5–6) and second-grade (8–9) children living in Switzerland (4′228 decisions collected from 326 children). In Part 1, we created two arbitrarily marked groups, triangles and circles. We randomly and repeatedly formed pairs with one triangle and one circle, and players in a pair played a simple bargaining game in which failure to agree destroyed the gains from social exchange. At the beginning of Part 1 we suggested a specific way to play the game. In symmetric treatments, this suggestion did not imply inequality between the groups, while in asymmetric treatments it did. Part 2 of the experiment addressed the generalization of norms. Retaining their group affili- ations from Part 1, each child had to distribute resources between an in-group member and an out-group member. Children of both age groups in symmetric treatments used our suggestions about how to play the game to coordinate in Part 1. In asymmetric treatments, children followed our suggestions less consistently, which reduced coordination but moderated inequality. In Part 2, older children did not generalize privilege from Part 1. Rather, they compensated the underprivileged. Younger children neither generalized privilege nor compensated the underprivileged

Pharmaceutical policies in Cyprus: a review of the current system and future options

The pharmaceutical market in Cyprus is characterised by several country- and system specific peculiarities and challenges, including: • Small market size; • The system of external price referencing (ERP) does not enable the country to capitalise on transaction prices in reference countries; • The absence of a health insurance scheme and the resulting absence of a suitable reimbursement system does not allow the country to exercise any form of market power; this may lead to inequities in access and expose citizens to undue financial and health risks; • There are no mechanisms in place to monitor and control the prescribing behaviour of physicians; coupled with brand awareness, this likely encourages the over-prescribing of expensive, on-patent products; • There do not appear to be any limits on promotional activities by manufacturers and distributors or any self-regulating practices (such as a code of practice), potentially incentivising providers to induce demand; • The pharmacy remuneration structure and the absence of generic substitution favour the dispensing of expensive products; • For patients, there is little cost-sharing in the public sector, whereas drug costs are borne out-of-pocket in the private sector. A World Health Organization (WHO) mission to study the current system of pharmaceutical pricing and coverage decisions resulted in a series of recommendations. Chronologically, these have been divided into three categories: first, interventions for the short-term to refine the way the current system works, aiming to increase its efficiency and economise on resources; second, interventions aiming to address gaps in the organisation and delivery of health and pharmaceutical services in anticipation of the introduction of a general health insurance scheme (GeSY); and, third, interventions aiming to ensure the sustainability of health and pharmaceutical care provision following GeSY implementation

Mining the Mind – Applying Quantitative Techniques to Understand Mental Models of Security

The personal information shared on Facebook can expose individuals to increased risk such as cybercrime and identity theft. While the perception of risk associated with online self-disclosure is increasing, this may not translate into risk management behaviours. This study explored why individuals choose to self-disclose on Facebook, often in spite of the risks. It was hypothesised that a personality style accentuated by impulsive and anti-social behaviour would help to explain this risk-behaviour dichotomy. In other words, individuals who are more narcissistic with less self-control were predicted to expose themselves to more risk on Facebook. An online questionnaire was completed by 263 Australians. This study found that individuals who had less self-control and higher narcissism exposed themselves to significantly more risk on Facebook. Hence, this study found that narcissism and self-control play a meaningful role in the risk-behaviour dichotomy. These findings add to the body of literature on online self-disclosure