In-Depth

Data mining profile: SAS Institute

Company comments

Comments of Wayne Thompson, product manager for SAS Enterprise Miner


On trends

"Data mining borrows from different communities. It [now includes both] statistical practices and elements from the AI community. The two parties have come together."

"OLAP, by comparison, is a rear-view mirror. You look at the data sliced and diced. With data mining, it’s about predictive modeling."

"What we really feel like is that organizations are inundated with data. That includes textual data in varied formats -- e-mail, call center reports and so on. Today, people want to take this textual data and create topical clusters. They want to combine it with structured data."

"Because we are looking at very large quantities of data, we are working on scalability to distribute these algorithms across machines."

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