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Before you can start the mining process you must restate the business problem as a data mining problem. Determine what information you need. There are several kinds of tasks in data mining:, each of which returns different information:
Predict a value (classification or regression problems)
Identify items that are associated (market basket)
Identify groupings of items (clusters)
Identify attributes that determine values (attribute importance)
For example, suppose that there is a high rate of customer attrition. To control this situation, that is, to minimize attrition, identify the customers that are likely to attrite and then develop strategies to keep them from attriting. To identify customers that are likely to attrite, build a model that predicts those customers, based on historical data. The data mining problem to solve is "build a classification model to predict customers likely to attrite."
It may be necessary to revisit this problem statement after you have analyzed data and built models.