• Fosca Giannotti ISTI-CNR, Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Lab fosca [dot] giannotti [at] isti [dot] cnr [dot] it

• Dino Pedreschi Università di Pisa, Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Lab pedre [at] di [dot] unipi [dot] it

• Assistente: Anna Monreale, Università di PIsa, Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Lab annam [at] di [dot] unipi [dot] it

• Wednesday 11 May 2016: install KNIME (http://www.knime.org).

Organizations and business are overwhelmed by the flood of data continuously collected into their data warehouses and arriving from external sources – the Web above all. Traditional exploratory techniques may fail to make sense of the data, due to its inherent complexity and size. Data mining and knowledge discovery techniques emerged as an alternative approach, aimed at revealing patterns, rules and models hidden in the data, and at supporting the analytical user to develop descriptive and predictive models for a number of business problems. This short course focusses on the main applications scenarios of data mining to challenging problems in the broad CRM domain - Customer Relationship Management.

• Clustering models for customer segmentation. Discussion of real cases. Hands-on project: segmentation of a base of anonymized customers from the retail industry. Clustering models for competitive intelligence.
• Patterns and association rule mining for market basket analysis. Hands-on project: mining association rules from sales data of the retail industry.
• Prediction models for promotion performance and churn analysis. Discussion of real cases. Hands-on project: churn prediction from a base of anonymized customers from the retail industry.
• Analysis of human mobility patterns by mobility data mining from big data. Mining official data for understanding of human behavior.
• Social network analysis for undestanding diffusion phenomena. Viral marketing.
• Application of data mining to geo-marketing. Analysis of innovators. Predictive models for fraud detection.

• Slides (see Calendar).

• Gordon S. Linoff e Michael J. Berry. Data Mining Techniques: For Marketing, Sales, and Customer Relationship Management. Wiley, 2011.

• Pang-Ning Tan, Michael Steinbach, Vipin Kumar. Introduction to Data Mining. Addison Wesley, ISBN 0-321-32136-7, 2006
  • http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~kumar/dmbook/index.php

• Data, data everywhere. The Economist, Feb. 2010 download
• Data scientist: The hot new gig in tech, CNN & Fortune, Sept. 2011 link
• Welcome to the yotta world. The Economist, Sept. 2011 download

0. Iris dataset. Iris

1. Shuttle dataset. Shuttle

2. Pima Indians Diabetes. Dataset

DSB-Churn Dataset: The dataset consists of 20,000 examples (lines, rows) over 12 variables (fields, columns) describing features of customers of a mobile phone provider, including the class variable LEAVE representing whether e customer decided to quit the company or not. The class variable, LEAVE, is the last variable on each line, and its legal values are LEAVE and STAY. The header of churn.arff describes the legal values of each variable. Informally, in the following we list their meanings:

COLLEGE : Is the customer college educated?

INCOME: Annual income

OVERAGE: Average overcharges per month

LEFTOVER: Average % leftover minutes per month

HOUSE: Value of dwelling (from census tract)

HANDSET_PRICE: Cost of phone

OVER_15MINS_CALLS_PER_MONTH: Average number of long (>15 mins) calls per month

AVERAGE_CALL_DURATION: Average call duration

REPORTED_SATISFACTION: Reported level of satisfaction

REPORTED_USAGE_LEVEL: Self-reported usage level

CONSIDERING_CHANGE_OF_PLAN: Was customer considering changing his/her plan?

LEAVE : Class variable: whether customer left or stayed

The dataset is available here.

Guidelines:

Each group (2-3 people) is required to deliver a report (max 10 pages including all figures) describing the methods adopted and the discussion of achieved results with reference to the tasks listed below. Assume that the report is targeted to a marketing strategist, who is interested to learn the story inferred in the various data mining analyses and to receive suggestions on how to take appropriate actions as a consequence.

1. Data Understanding: useful as a preliminary step to capture basic data property. Distribution analysis, statistical exploration, correlation analysis, suitable transformation of variables and elimination of redundant variables, management of missing values.

2. Market Basket Analysis. Problem: prepare data and extract interesting association rules and frequent patterns. The report should discuss the parameters used for the analyses, justifying your findings related to the most interesting rules according to the different measure introduced in the course.

3. Customer segmentation with k-means. Problem: find a high-quality clustering using K-means and discuss the profile of each found cluster (in terms of the properties that describe the properties of the customers of each cluster). The report should illustrate the adopted clustering methodology and the cluster interpretation. In particular, it is necessary to discuss the identification of the best value of k and the characterisation of the obtained clusters by using both analysis of the k centroids and comparison of the statistics of variables within the clusters with that in the whole dataset.

4. Churn analysis with decision trees. Problem: find a high-quality decision tree that predicts whether each customer will STAY or LEAVE. The report should illustrate the adopted classification methodology and the decision tree validation and interpretation, describing also the process adopted to select the proposed tree, together with its quality evaluation.

Deadline: send the report by email to all instructors within 4 July 2014. Specify [MAINS] in the subject of the email.

The exam consists in the evaluation of the report of the proposed mining exercises.

• Data Mining for Customer Relationship Management 2016
• Data Mining for Customer Relationship Management 2015
• Data Mining for Customer Relationship Management 2014
• Data Mining for Customer Relationship Management 2013