The Search for Gold Nuggets Using CRISP-DM Without a Seasoned Miner

The rise of data mining has brought many changes to people’s lives but also to companies and the importance of data analysis. Companies always had a tendency to gather as much data as possible but it has only been recently due to the developments in IT that large quantities of data can be analyzed in a fast and easy way. This new field gave rise to the methodology of Cross Industry Standard Process for Data mining (CRISP-DM) and this method is the current standard of data mining. This process has been widely applied but has not been updated since its release in 1999. There have been many suggestions for improvements to the technique by researchers such as Clifton and Thuraisingham [3] as well as Zapata and Gil [13] and many others. This study will look into what improvements can be made to CRISP-DM. The improvements recommended by this study are based on a literature study as well as a field study at a company to observe a data mining process. There were many suggestions found in the literature to improve CRISP-DM and the field study showed that there is not always a project leader but a departmental structure present at a company making it harder to implement a methodology such as CRISP-DM. This paper has made six suggestions for improvements to CRISPDM which can result in new versions of CRISP-DM or even new data mining techniques.