My notes from Ian Ayres Super crunchers book

Application of data mining techniques
Handbook of Statistical Analysis and Data Mining Applications

1. Continental airlines found that, if the customers were sent apology letters after an unpleasant experience, it can improve customer satisfaction and can lead to increased revenue.
2. UPS uses algorithms to control customer churn,
3. Harrahs has determined ‘pain point’ for its frequent customers.  Pain point is the loss limit a customer may endure before he/she will start to withdraw.  Once they sense that a customer his pain-point, a staff may approach the customer and suggest that he take a discount coupon for dinner.
4. Farecast has more than 5 TB of data to determine likely movements in air fares.  
5. Capital One has set up systems for automatic customer service.  They have also run more than 28,000 expereiments.  They have been at it since 1995.
6. In South Africa, Credit Indemnity has been conducting may experiments in lending.
7. Offermatica’s system serves one of many designed web page to customer and tracks customer preference. It then uses to customer behavior data to predict effectiveness of web pages.
8. AdWords has a randomization feature that allows random use of adwords in campaign.
9. Some charitable organizations find that if the letter for solicitation has information on availability of matching grants, it has better chance of getting a positive response.
10. Experiment based government has been used in many countries (p66)
11. Data driven policy making is also becoming popular in many nations (p75).
12. Educating rural Indians has used data driven policies (p75).
13. Progreso program in Mexico has helped reduce crime, and improved people’s lives in Mexico.
14. Evidence based medicine initiatives has shown to save many lives (p86).
15. Medical diagnosis software system Isabel is being used widely (p97).
16. Medline website has compiled findings from various clinical experimental studies, and the results are available for physicianss to use (p108).
    Data Analysis with Open Source Tools
17. Evidence based decision making is found effective in IT purchase management also (p110).
18. Parole management has also benefited from using evidence based determination (p118).
19. The relationship between circumcision and control of spread of AIDS has been establilshed through data based analysis.
20. Neural networks has been used in predicting outcomes of dog-racing (p142).
21. Epogogix has been shown to use text based data mining  to predict success of movie scripts (p145).
22. Further readings in Data crunching is on p 247.
    
    Handbook of Statistical Analysis and Data Mining Applications