We are fortunate to be surrounded by some of the most talented data miners anywhere, so our first thanks go to our colleagues at Data Miners, Inc. from whom we have learned so much: Will Potts, Dorian Pyle, and Brij Masand. There are also clients with whom we work so closely that we consider them our colleagues as well: Harrison Sohmer and Stuart E. Ward, III are in that category. Our Editor, Bob Elliott, Editorial Assistant, Erica Weinstein, and Development Editor, Emilie Herman, kept us (more or less) on schedule and helped us maintain a consistent style. Lauren McCann, a graduate student at M.I.T. and intern at Data Miners, prepared the census data used in some examples and created some of the illustrations.

We would also like to acknowledge all of the people we have worked with in scores of data mining engagements over the years. We have learned something from every one of them. The many whose data mining projects have influenced the second edition of this book include:

xx Acknowledgments

And, of course, all the people we thanked in the first edition are still deserving of acknowledgement:

Jerry Modes

About the Authors

Michael J. A. Berry and Gordon S. Linoff are well known in the data mining field. They have jointly authored three influential and widely read books on data mining that have been translated into many languages. They each have close to two decades of experience applying data mining techniques to business problems in marketing and customer relationship management.

Michael and Gordon first worked together during the 1980s at Thinking Machines Corporation, which was a pioneer in mining large databases. In 1996, they collaborated on a data mining seminar, which soon evolved into the first edition of this book. The success of that collaboration gave them the courage to start Data Miners, Inc., a respected data mining consultancy, in 1998. As data mining consultants, they have worked with a wide variety of major companies in North America, Europe, and Asia, turning customer databases, call detail records, Web log entries, point-of-sale records, and billing files into useful information that can be used to improve the customer experience. The authors years of hands-on data mining experience are reflected in every chapter of this extensively updated and revised edition of their first book, Data Mining Techniques.

When not mining data at some distant client site, Michael lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Gordon lives in New York City.