1. XLMiner – a Data Mining Toolkit
QuantLink Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

2. XLMiner – a quick tour Here is a short demo of XLMiner.
Let us use a simple example:
a bank sends mailers to its customers, offering a special deal on Personal Loans. In its previous campaign, it got only about 9% positive response.
Objective: How to target customers for increased conversion rate.
In other words, the question to address is:
what profile indicates a high-potential customer?
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolkit

3. XLMiner – a quick tour
Past campaign data will be used to train the data mining model
This is called supervised learning in DataMining terms
Let’s see how to build a model and use it for improving the response rate.
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolkit

4. XLMiner Quick Tour Data description
Our past campaign data has the following customer attributes:
Customer ID
Customer’s Age
Professional Experience
Family Income
Credit Card average annual spending
Education Level
#appliances owned
Did this customer accept past campaign offer?
The last variable is the known outcome of the past campaign. Our Data Mining model will use this for Supervised Learning.
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolkit

5. XLMiner Quick Tour A view of the data
This is what the data looks like:
The variable labeled as “PersLoan?” is binary:
0 means the customer was not interested in the Personal Loan.
1 means the customer was interested.
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolkit

6. XLMiner Quick Tour the Data Mining Process
Partition the data into
Training & Validation
Partitions
Fit the Model on
Training Partition only
Obtain results, see
if they look good
enough
Check if they
are good for
Validation data too!
Study the outputs
for validation data
Try out several
alternative models
Choose and deploy
the best model
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolkit

7. XLMiner Quick Tour Start the analysis
Let’s get going with XLMiner.
Notice that XLMiner is as easy to use as Excel!
All we need to do is use the friendly menus. We follow just three simple steps to fit a model and see the outputs!
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolkit

8. XLMiner Quick Tour Step 1: Partition the data
We’ll create two partitions by choosing the records randomly.
The Training Partition will be used for fitting the model.
The Validation partition will be used for checking if the model gives a good fit for another piece of known data.
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolkit

9. XLMiner Quick Tour Partitioned Data
XLMiner creates a Partition Sheet that shows the data split into Two partitions.
Easy Hyperlinks on the Navigator facilitate viewing of either partition
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolkit

10. XLMiner Quick Tour Step 2: Fitting the Model
This is a “Classification” Problem where we want to predict customers as likely / not likely to take a Personal Loan.
Let’s use one of the available techniques – Classification Tree.
Later we can use other Classification techniques.
We select input (predictor) variables here…
…and the outcome variable here
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolkit

11. XLMiner Quick Tour Step 2: Fitting the Model
The model fit guides us through easy wizard-like steps.
In these steps we choose technique-specific parameters and the output options.
In the end, we click Finish to produce the results.
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolkit

12. XLMiner Quick Tour Step 3: Understanding the Outputs
The friendly Output Navigator lets us go over all the outputs.
The Summaries show us the classification error percentages – i.e. how well the model is predicting
Many other diagnostic outputs are available depending on options we choose.
Other outputs (like the Tree here) will tell us the decision rules that the model is suggesting.
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolkit

13. XLMiner Quick Tour Output 1: Validation Summary
First, we look at how well the model predicted for the Validation data set
In the Training data where we already knew the outcome,
156 “will buy” were predicted correctly, and 38 wrongly.
1801 “Won’t buy” were predicted correctly and merely 5 wrongly.
Here are the corresponding error percentages.
The errors are not very small but could still indicate a workable model.
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolkit

14. XLMiner Quick Tour Output 2: the decision rule
Here is the Classification Tree that gives the easy-to-understand and implement Decision Rules
Cut-off points for different variables decide whether to go Left or Right
0: not likely to buy
1: likely to buy
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolkit

15. XLMiner Quick Tour the decision rule in table form
The same decision rule as shown visually, can be converted into the table below. This is useful for implementing it in your information systems.
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolkit

16. XLMiner Quick Tour Output 3: more details
Each technique (Classification Tree in this case) has additional helpful outputs
The example here shows the “Prune Log” – how the percentage error reduced by “pruning” the tree
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolkit

17. XLMiner Quick Tour Output 4: the Lift Chart
“Lift” tells us how much better the model did compared to a random targeting of customers. This is one of the most important outputs.
With our Tree model, we get a much superior result. In less than 500 mailers sent to high probability customers, we would get nearly 170 successes!
If customers were targeted randomly, we would expect this outcome. For instance, 1000 mailers would probably yield less than 100 customers.
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolkit

18. XLMiner Quick Tour Output 5: the Detailed report
The Validation data is “scored” in detail as shown below. Scoring means using the fitted model to classify each record of the data.
Probability of success is computed for each record. This is what helps XLMiner suggest selective records (customers) to target.
Predicted values can be seen against the actuals here.
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolkit

19. XLMiner Quick Tour Try several techniques!
That was just one of the many techniques in XLMiner – Classification Tree.
A typical Data Mining exercise involves several alternative approaches on the same data. This can be either with different techniques, or with different parameters, or both.
Comparing multiple approaches lets us “assess” which model to finally choose for implementation.
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolkit

20. XLMiner Quick Tour Rich repertoire of techniques!
XLMiner supports a comprehensive array of supervised learning procedures:
Multiple Linear Regression
Logistic Regression
Classification & Regression Trees
Neural Networks
k Nearest Neighbors
Naïve Bayes Classifier
Discriminant Analysis
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolkit

21. XLMiner Quick Tour Rich repertoire of techniques!
... and several other features in Unsupervised Learning, Data Reduction and Exploration:
Principal Components Analysis
k-means Clustering
Hierarchical Clustering
Self-organizing Maps (coming soon)
Affinity– Market Basket Analysis
Here are some sample outputs from these methods …
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolkit

22. XLMiner Quick Tour sample output - Dendrogram
Hierarchical Clustering produces a dendrogram – an excellent visual representation of Cluster formation.
Height of the bars is a measure of dissimilarity in the clusters that are merging into one.
Smaller clusters “agglomerate” into bigger ones, with least possible loss of cohesiveness at each stage.
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolkit

23. XLMiner Quick Tour sample output – cluster predictions
Cluster Analysis has many powerful uses like Market Segmentation. We can view individual record’s predicted cluster membership.
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolkit

24. XLMiner Quick Tour sample output – BoxPlots
XLMiner supports powerful visualization. The example here shows BoxPlots of two variables.
Cluster 2 clearly shows higher Income & Credit Card spend than Cluster 1. This is an excellent aid to characterizing the clusters
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolkit

25. XLMiner Quick Tour sample output – Scatter Plots
Matrix Scatterplots in XLMiner give a visual insight into relationship among variables.
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolkit

26. XLMiner Quick Tour sample output – Association Rules
For Market Basket Analysis XLMiner produces easy-to-read Association Rules
Rules are explained in simple English!
Each rule tells us which offerings will go well together
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolkit

27. XLMiner Quick Tour … and that’s not all!
XLMiner has handy utilities for Data handling:
Missing data treatment
Transforming categorical data
Binning continuous data
Sampling from Databases
Scoring to Databases
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolkit

28. XLMiner Quick Tour XLMiner => Versatility!
This was a quick demonstration of just a few things XLMiner can do.
It can do lots more. It is comprehensive in coverage, like the best DM products around.
Get your free download for evaluation at
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolkit

29. XLMiner Quick Tour XLMiner => Simplicity!
Daryl Pregibon had said – Data Mining is “Statistics at Scale and Speed”.
You’ll find that XLMiner is Statistics at Scale, Speed and Simplicity!
If you know to use Excel, you already know XLMiner. You can get started in minutes.
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolkit

30. XLMiner Quick Tour XLMiner => Great Value!
Several comprehensive DM products are many times more expensive.
For exploring how Data Mining will work for you, XLMiner provides a great start!
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolkit

31. XLMiner Quick Tour What others say …
The American Statistician reviewed XLMiner along with other reputed products in the November 2003 issue
This is what it had to say:
“An easy to use… an excellent, inexpensive add-on that greatly expands the capabilities of Excel.”
“XLMiner’s documentation is remarkably good…”
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolkit

32. XLMiner Quick Tour More Resources
For your initiation into Data Mining:
Free evaluation download
Online Courses at
Case Book in the making
Technical references on product website
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolkit

33. XLMiner Quick Tour Thank you for viewing this Demo!
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolset
for the Managers of Tomorrow
XLMiner - the Data Mining Toolkit