Data Mining with MineSet: What Worked, What Did Not, and What Might

At Silicon Graphics, Inc., we have developed a data mining and visualization product called MineSet(Silicon Graphics 1998, Brunk, Kelly & Kohavi 1997). MineSet first released in early 1996 mostly as a visualization product and then became a full data mining and visualization product late that year with several data mining algorithms based onMLC++ (Kohavi, Sommerfield & Dougherty 1997). The engineering effort in product development is estimated at over 55 person years, with the engineering team consisting of 17 people right now. During our development we interacted with dozens of customers, taught data mining courses, and used our product on internal databases in our company. In this paper we detail some things that worked well, some things that did not work as well as we hoped, and some thoughts about the future.