Expanding Data Mining Power with System Dynamics

Business intelligence (BI) is a key topic in business today, since it is focused on strategic decision making and on the search of value from business activities through empowering a “forward-thinking” view of the world. From this perspective, one of the most valuable concepts within BI is the “knowledge discovery in databases” or “data mining,” defined as “the process of discovering meaningful new correlations, patterns, and trends by sifting through large amounts of data stored in repositories, using pattern recognition technologies as well as statistical and mathematical techniques” (SPSS, 1997). The usage of data mining as we currently know dates back to 1995 (Pyle, 2003). Since then, many applications were developed, and now it is a critical discipline to gain business insight. Table 1 shows a list of current data mining applications. System Dynamics