Define business objectives by Tom Khabaza
Business objectives are the origin of every data mining solution. This may seem obvious for how can there be a solution without an objective? Yet this statement defines the field of data mining; everything we do in data mining is informed by, and oriented towards, an objective in the business or domain in which we are operating. For this reason, defining the business objectives for a data mining project is the first key step from which everything else follows.
The importance of business objectives in data mining
It is possible to describe data mining or other analytical activities without reference to business context but to do so is to omit a crucial component. It's because business knowledge is central to every step of the data mining process. There are two reasons for this:
- Data necessarily provides a narrow or limited view of the world—the real world is always much richer than the data we collect about it—business knowledge is...
