A new personal data mining technology could make people searches and background checks faster and more reliable.

Many companies that collect people’s personal information have large amounts of information on individuals, but don’t have good technology for searching and analyzing all of this personal data.

Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a computer scientist from the University of Utah, has developed a data mining tool that makes the searching and analyzing of this personal data faster and easier.

Search engines like Google; Social networks like Facebook and retailers like Walmart as well as government departments are in the process of creating profiles of people. These people profiles contain hundreds of details on a person.

Your web searches, retail purchases, Facebook likes and social network of friends are all stored in multiple corporate and government databases.

Each of these details say something about a person. The trick is mining all of these details to get an overall picture of someone.

Venkatasubramanian and his coworkers have created a new way to mine multidimensional data on people.

He says that previous data mining methods have trouble analyzing personal information from more than 5,000 people. The new data mining method can easily crunch numerous details on more than 50,000 people.

Analyzing numerous details about people poses a problem because each personal attribute can impact other details.

Some common examples of companies using personal data mining include Amazon’s product recommendations to buyers based on their past purchases as well as the purchases of people with similar interests.

Netflix uses a similar personal data tool for recommending movies and Facebook recommends friends based on people who already are your friends as well as friends of friends.

The ever growing volume of this personal information from search engines, social networks and giant retailers is what makes the mining of details on people so difficult.

The new data mining technology can handle large amounts of personal data because it analyzes people’s attributes incrementally, rather than all at once. This speeds up the data mining of people because you can start without having all the information and mine a person’s information as you go.

Venkatasubramanian will discuss his new personal data mining tool on July 28 in Washington at the Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, which is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery.

Many consumers don’t realize this, but one of the most popular places for collecting and mining consumer data is at their grocery store.

The KY Post recently featured a news story about how grocery store chain Kroger collects and analyses customer behavior through their Kroger Plus Cards.

Bill Brown, a Kroger customer featured in the story, acknowledges that he is aware that his grocery card tells Kroger what he buys and when he buys it. However, he isn’t concerned about privacy issues when he uses the card due to the cost savings the card gives him.

Millions of Kroger customers receive coupons in Loyal Customer Mailings that are based on mined data from their Plus Card information.

Matching customers with the best coupons is a complex effort. One Kroger mailing was individually targeted to 95% of the recipients.

Yes, your mailing is based on what you buy.

Businesses like Kroger are stepping up their data mining efforts to learn more about customer behavior and increase sales.

It is estimated that 40% of all U.S. households have a Kroger’s card.

Interestingly, Kroger also owns a 50% stake in dunnhumbyUSA, the company that handles its data mining operations.

Over 330 dunnhumby employees analyze customer data daily to identify the best shoppers for Kroger.

Other dunnhumbyUSA clients include Macy’s, Procter & Gamble, Coca Cola, Pepsico, Kellog’s, Kraft Foods and Home Depot. Panera Bread is also using dunnhumby to create a customer loyalty plan.

A treasure trove of customer data is collected and mined daily by dunnhumby which leads to privacy concerns for some.

To protect its customers, Kroger lets card holders opt out of their mailings and Kroger executives say that consumer information is never sold to third parties.

[ Source: KY Post ]

Two former Yahoo executives have started a new data mining company called nPario. Bassel Ojjeh and Krishna Uppala, former Yahoo execs, along with former SAS executive Basel Tutunji launched nPario on March 17, 2010.

nPario is a data mining and data analysis company that will help businesses mine consumer data to understand and market consumer behavior.

The nPario management team is made up of digital data experts with a long history of successes in the data management and data mining fields.

nPario believes that businesses and organizations could boost revenue by more than 10% if they can use data mining tools to predict consumer intent.

[ source: nPario ]

Seminole Hard Rock Hotels & Casinos are using SAS Enterprise Miner data-mining software to analyze millions of gambler records from their customer database to target the casino’s marketing efforts.

Jeffrey Hook, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Seminole Hard Rock, said, “We know our database is worth more revenue than we’re currently getting. SAS Enterprise Miner’s broad toolset will support our entire data mining process. We can quickly and efficiently produce models that help our marketers reach the right person with the right offer at the right time.”

One of the company’s marketing plans is to invite gamblers who don’t visit their casinos regularly, but who are likely to visit the casino when formally invited.

The Hard Rock estimates that the marketing information obtained from data-mining their customer records will generate enough additional revenue to pay for the SAS software within six months.

[ Source: BusinessWire ]

The rise of social networks and social media has put millions of people within a few degrees of separation of each other and made it easier for them to post and share volumes of personal data online.

Many people who use social networks like Facebook and MySpace are more than willing to publish any and all personal information about themselves for people to see.

The willingness of people to share this personal information online has created a virtual goldmine of data that can be mined and analyzed by others for a large number of intriguing uses.

Everyone from financial services companies to marketers are collecting this personal data from social networks for their own new and unique uses.

Recently, Roger Thompson, a researcher at AVG, discovered that his credit card company was using data from his Facebook profile. He wrote about a situation where they asked him to confirm information about himself for credit security reasons, and one of the questions they asked him involved the identity of his daughter-in-law. According to Richard Thompson, this personal data had not been provided to his bank by him and is only publicly available on his Facebook profile.

Reportedly, some number-crunching credit card companies and financial firms are working on computer algorithms that analyze a credit applicant’s social network of friends in the belief that people who are a credit risk tend to associate with one another.

These examples and others suggest that companies are aware of the growing levels of personal data on social networks, and are starting to experiment with how it can be analyzed for business intelligence.

According to Dallas Lawrence, head of the social media practice group at Levick Strategic Communications, 2009 saw an explosion in the number of people joining and using social networks and social media sites. As a result, he believes that companies will collect this personal data and combine it with new search technology to analyze the “trillions of data points” that are now available to them.

The industry that is driving much of the interest in social media data mining is advertising and marketing.

Until social networking came along, these data-hungry companies were limited to collecting mostly anonymous information. Social networks filled in the missing piece; identifying who is reading what online and buying what on e-commerce sites.

The next step will be the analysis of your online friends’ data for, example, scoring credit and other data-mining uses that involve the “birds of a feather flock together” idea.

Social network information is fast becoming the subject of court cases.

Just as data mining of social media information is new, so is the legal idea that people might have some rights over their online information, according to attorney Elise Dieterich.

Although there are a couple of bills moving through the US House and Senate that address data accountability, trust and uses by third-party data brokers, people should assume that the personal information they post on social networks can and will be used for reasons they may have never intended.

[ Source: TechNewsWorld ]