Hi.
I always find choosing texts a difficult problem. There are trade-offs between matching your syllabus and the preparation level of the students.
The two books you mention are both well-written and well-organized. but quite different. Kuhn and Johnson has a hands on predictive modeling focus. This book is great if you intend your course to be modeling project oriented. Provost and Fawcett is really focused on creating data driven business processes.
A more data mining methods focused book you might want to consider is Data Mining for
Business Analytics by Shmulie, et.al. I have not used this book in my course but know that others teaching business-oriented data mining courses have had good experiences with this book. The book is R-oriented (which I assume is what you plan for your course) and covers state of the art topics like social network analysis and recommender systems.
If you want to incorporate more network analysis into your course I can recommend
A First Course in Network Science by Menczer, et.al. It is a short gem of a book on this subject with a math level suitable for business students.
For my course I have good success with
Mining of Massive Data Sets by Leskovec et.al. This book has a computer science focus and assumes good mathematical preparation, and so might not fit well for your business students. Most of my students are from computer science or data science. It may help you to bootstrap your course to have a look at the Github repo I have created for my course:
https://github.com/StephenElston/CSCI-E-96. Like all course material this is a work in progress.
Good luck with your course and best regards, Steve
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Stephen Elston
Principal Consultant, Quantia Analytics, LLC
Instructor, Havard Extension School
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Original Message:
Sent: 09-20-2021 16:15
From: Regis OConnor
Subject: What text would you recommend for Data Mining for Predictive Decision Making?
Can you give me some advice?
I am developing a graduate level Business Analytics course in Data Mining for Predictive Decision Making.
Here are two potential texts I am considering:
#1 Applied Predictive Modeling by Kuhn and Johnson
#2 Data Science for Business by Provost and Fawcett
Please let me know what your preference would be between these two - and why.
Or, share if you have a different text to recommend.
Thanks!
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Regis OConnor
President
O'Connor Analytics LLC
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