Translating your business objective into a data mining objective by Dean Abbott

The business objectives use business language to describe the purpose of the data mining project. However, business objectives are not sufficiently specific to build predictive models; business objectives must be translated into data mining goals. These data mining objectives should be expressed in the language of data mining or data mining software so that the objectives are clear and reproducible.

For example, let's assume the federal government is trying to crack down on government-contracting invoice fraud. A broad business objective may be to identify fraudulent invoices more effectively from the millions of invoices submitted annually. A more specific business objective may be to develop predictive models to identify 100 invoices per month for investigators to examine that are highly likely to be fraudulent.

For the former, the business objective can be to create a data mining objective such as building...