Top 10 data mining techniques in business applications: a brief survey

TLDR

Data mining is essential for effective business decision‑making, a fact underscored by numerous surveys exploring its application across various business problems. This paper surveys recent literature to determine the most frequently used data mining techniques in business applications. The authors reviewed surveys published in reputable journals over the past decade to catalog the techniques most often applied in business contexts. They identified 33 techniques across eight application areas, with the top ten—decision tree, genetic algorithm, k‑nearest neighbor, multilayer perceptron, naïve Bayes, support vector machine, association rule, expectation maximization, and k‑means—being the most widely used in business.

Abstract

Purpose Data mining is widely considered necessary in many business applications for effective decision-making. The importance of business data mining is reflected by the existence of numerous surveys in the literature focusing on the investigation of related works using data mining techniques for solving specific business problems. The purpose of this paper is to answer the following question: What are the widely used data mining techniques in business applications? Design/methodology/approach The aim of this paper is to examine related surveys in the literature and thus to identify the frequently applied data mining techniques. To ensure the recent relevance and quality of the conclusions, the criterion for selecting related studies are that the works be published in reputed journals within the past 10 years. Findings There are 33 different data mining techniques employed in eight different application areas. Most of them are supervised learning techniques and the application area where such techniques are most often seen is bankruptcy prediction, followed by the areas of customer relationship management, fraud detection, intrusion detection and recommender systems. Furthermore, the widely used ten data mining techniques for business applications are the decision tree (including C4.5 decision tree and classification and regression tree), genetic algorithm, k-nearest neighbor, multilayer perceptron neural network, naïve Bayes and support vector machine as the supervised learning techniques and association rule, expectation maximization and k-means as the unsupervised learning techniques. Originality/value The originality of this paper is to survey the recent 10 years of related survey and review articles about data mining in business applications to identify the most popular techniques.