Comparison of Ethnography and Data Mining

Ethnography and data mining

The ethnography is an ancient tool used by anthropology, based on field observations and descriptively studies the customs and traditions of people. The power of this has made it applied in consumer behavior as it seeks to use all the mechanisms of social and biological sciences to understand human behavior. In addition, ethnography is complemented synergistically with the tools of data mining, which are similar to those of traditional mining. That is, in a reservoir can be a lot of material with different law, and must have a refining process, which in this case is the insight to our company. Therefore, the ethnography of the data is then the method that integrates both worlds (the observation of customs and traditions in the data mining), as it is necessary to know the business and qualitatively known to consumers before initiating process segmentations or prediction only from the numbers.

This method consists in analyzing the data and start a process of selection and definition of variables is based on assumptions from the qualitative world. In this vast world of variables, without a qualitative knowledge base, it will be impossible to imagine the segments. For this reason we should follow the following process.

Analyze what information we have and check their quality, how it was generated and stored.

From these data generate hypotheses. For example, mobile consumers are naturally segmented by origin or destination of calls, understanding whether for social work or family.

Having a set of hypotheses developed the first definitions of patterns within the data.

With this version works in market research, that is, go find the segments defined by consumers.

Validation: at the moment you start the evaluation of hypotheses defined changed and structures segments. The iteration occurs because after each call, in the case ...