| The first edition of Data Mining Techniques for Marketing, Sales, and Customer Support appeared on book shelves in 1997. The book actually got its start in 1996 as Gordon and I were developing a 1-day data mining seminar for NationsBank (now Bank of America). Sue Osterfelt, a vice president at NationsBank and the author of a book on database applications with Bill Inmon, convinced us that our seminar material ought to be developed into a book. She introduced us to Bob Elliott, her editor at John Wiley & Sons, and before we had time to think better of it, we signed a contract.
Neither of us had written a book before, and drafts of early chapters clearly showed this. Thanks to Bob’s help, though, we made a lot of progress, and the final product was a book we are still proud of. It is no exaggeration to say that the experience changed our lives — first by taking over every waking hour and some when we should have been sleeping; then, more positively, by providing the basis for the consulting company we founded, Data Miners, Inc. The first book, which has become a standard text in data mining, was followed by others, Mastering Data Mining and Mining the Web.
So, why a revised edition? The world of data mining has changed a lot since we starting writing in 1996. For instance, back then, Amazon.com was still new; U.S. mobile phone calls cost on average 56 cents per minute, and fewer than 25 percent of Americans even owned a mobile phone; and the KDD data mining conference was in its second year. Our understanding has changed even more. For the most part, the underlying algorithms remain the same, although the software in which the algorithms are imbedded, the data to which they are applied, and the business problems they are used to solve have all grown and evolved. |