Top Posts in 2012

For the second consecutive year, a quick look back at posts from the prior year.

For posted in 2012, in order of popularity:

1. Target, Pregnancy, and Predictive Analytics, Part I
2. Target, Pregnancy, and Predictive Analytics, Part II
3. Predictive Analytics World Had the Target Story First
4. Why Defining the Target Variable in Predictive Analytics is Critical
5. Dilbert, Database Marketing, and Spam

I’m also adding #6 because Will post in December did very well, but of course has had only one month to accumulate views.

6. 6 Reasons You Hired the Wrong Data Miner

From posts prior to 2012, in order of popularity for 2012:

1. What Do Data Miners Need to Learn (June 2011)
2. Free and Inexpensive Data Mining Software (November 2006) This post needs to be updated!
3. Why Normalization Matters for K Means (April 2009) It always amazes me why this post persists as one of the most popular, but nearly ¼ of the visits used the search term “K Means Noisy Data”
4. Data Mining Data Sets (April 2008) This post also needs to be updated
5. Business Analytics vs. Business Intelligence (December 2009)

One final note: When I look back at visits since the start of this blog, 4 of the top 5 posts are the top 4 “prior to 2012” above. The #5 most popular post over all the years I’ve had the blog is one by Will from 2007, “Missing Values and Special Values: The Plague of Data Analyis”, one that I have always liked very much.

Best to all of you in 2013!