10 Reasons Why Data Mining is Fun and Rewarding

1. You can train your computer to do things you can't.
2. The methods are complicated, but the applications are intuitive.
3. It can save/make lots of money.
4. Data mining has applications in nearly any area you can think of.
5. You get to deal with data sets larger than you could ever process in your mind.
6. There are big developments taking place in the industry.
7. Data mining algorithms attempt to model how things work in biology and the real world. (ie. Neural networks/genetic algorithms)
8. There is no one size fits all solution when it comes to data mining.
9. You help make the statement "I have more data than I know what to do with" obsolete.
10. Your results can make an immediate impact in whatever industry you are involved in.

Why do you like data mining today? What got you interested in the first place?

Data Mining in the Workplace

I graduate in a few months and so I've been job hunting lately. I attended the Technical Career Fair here at BYU a few weeks back and I was impressed by the number of companies that were interested in data mining. With the exception of one or two companies, they all either were currently involved in data mining or were interested in becoming involved in the near future. I think that as more and more companies amass mounds of data, they are realizing that collecting data for data's sake is useless and that they can get much more out of their data than they have in the past. Data mining is no longer 'a hiss and a byword'. I am witnessing firsthand that it is the direction that many companies are taking to improve the efficiency of their operations.