One of the wonders of data mining, beyond most realms of software development, is that the end is defined at the start.  Before everything it all starts with a question….

“I want to know the average journey time from Belfast to Derry based on real journey data.”

“What’s the most popular word used in the profiles of my Facebook friends?”

And that’s why I love because we start with the end in mind. This makes life a lot easier in terms of defining what we need in terms of the raw data, the methods to clean it and then the analysis that needs to happen in order to get the final answer(s).

Business intelligence thrives on the concrete business case, a question and the pursuit of the answer. Whether we use Processing, Java, Hadoop, R, Gephi or a mixture of anything to get to the conclusion, well that’s part of the fun for me.  It’s an interesting journey… the next few years are going to be a lot of fun.