Page 157 - DCAP208_Management Support Systems

Management Support Systems

Notes “We can take feeds from almost anything. We can use that information to ask if there is a
correlation between a store that loses a lot of product and EAS deactivations and alarms.
One of the departures from previous approaches is that for an application to be truly
effective, we have to integrate multiple sets of data,” says Hearn.

Several data mining applications already use video feed from CCTV cameras to make
sense of Epos data. Many retailers would like to use the two technologies together, but
they are unable to do so because their CCTV cameras use analogue rather than digital
film. For most retailers, the cost of replacing analogue cameras with digital cameras far
exceeds the financial benefits that they expect to gain from reducing their losses.
Retailers with radio frequency identification (RFID) projects could even use the information
from tagged pallets or individually tagged items within their data mining applications.
Unfortunately for advocates of RFID technology, the only retailer with a public RFID
project in the UK is Marks & Spencer, which tags different ranges of clothing in most of its
major stores.
Audit teams use a type of network theory called link analysis to understand the patterns
between data on different systems. Auditors look for symmetric patterns between two
sets of data, or more likely asymmetric patterns, to understand the relationships between
different types of information.
Retailers are not the only organisations that use data mining to look for correlating
information. Governments have used data mining to sift through huge amounts of data to
identify potential terrorist attacks. In 2002, the Pentagon started a secret project called
Total Information Awareness in an attempt to identify terrorists. Total Information
Awareness was a data mining project on a massive scale. In 2003, it was cancelled after
Congress removed funding over fears that it was too intrusive.

Question
Discuss how data mining is used to reduce losses from crime and waste.

Source: http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Case-study-Jaeger-uses-data-mining-to-reduce-
losses-from-crime-and-waste

9.3 Summary

Data mining uses a relatively large amount of computing power operating on a large set
of data to determine regularities and connections between data points.
Data Mining, also popularly known as Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD), refers to
the nontrivial extraction of implicit, previously unknown and potentially useful
information from data in databases.
Flat files are actually the most common data source for data mining algorithms, especially
at the research level.
A relational database consists of a set of tables containing either values of entity attributes,
or values of attributes from entity relationships.

A data warehouse as a storehouse, is a repository of data collected from multiple data
sources (often heterogeneous) and is intended to be used as a whole under the same
unified schema.
A transaction database is a set of records representing transactions, each with a time
stamp, an identifier and a set of items.

150 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY