Did Derren Brown use data mining!
Last week has seen the acquisition of Remarc by QA. With the many presentations that Remarc employees have attended, many are excited at the opportunities that they have with the UK’s leading provider of learning services. The atmosphere within the company is one of excitement as we find our place within this new and vibrant organisation. At the end of the week there was one burning question.
“How did Derren Brown predict the lottery results correctly on Wednesday night?”
All the conspiracy theories where abound in the staff room, and as I sat down and watched Mr Brown explain the processes that he had used to derive the magic 6 numbers, it dawned on me that his methodology could almost manifest itself as a process that could be used in a technology growing in popularity known as data mining.
Now, in this blog, I am not going to give you the next winning lottery numbers. But watching the process that Derren Brown explains in his programme would be seen in the data mining world as a data mining algorithm. Some would quite rightly argue a complex one, as he is dealing with the psyche of the human mind within his methodology.
For those of you that don’t know data mining. In the context of Microsoft , Data mining is a component of Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services that provide the ability to analyse the data within a relational or multi-dimensional data source by using data mining algorithms. The common misconception is that it is just used to make predictions based on the historical data that is stored within your business; the objective of Derren Brown’s exercise in predicting the lottery numbers.
However, data mining is much more than that. Allowing you to group data together and find associations and patterns within the data that may not be so evident, so that you can extrapolate meaning from them so informed business decisions can be made.
Microsoft makes the process of using data mining straight forward using existing tools such as Business Intelligence Development Studio. However; it is going mainstream, and the release of the Microsoft Excel Data Mining add in will now allow business users to make use of this fascinating technology.
Now if only someone could develop a new algorithm called the BrownDM algorithm.......