Web Scraper Shortcode WordPress Plugin Review

This short post is on the WP-plugin called Web Scraper Shortcode, that enables one to retrieve a portion of a web page or a whole page and insert it directly into a post. This plugin might be used for getting fresh data or images from web pages for your WordPress driven page without even visiting it. More scraping plugins and sowtware you can find in here.

To install it in WordPress go to Plugins -> Add New.
Usage

The plugin scrapes the page content and applies parameters to this scraped page if specified. To use the plugin just insert the

[web-scraper ]

shortcode into the HTML view of the WordPress page where you want to display the excerpts of a page or the whole page. The parameters are as follows:

    url (self explanatory)
    element – the dom navigation element notation, similar to XPath.
    limit – the maximum number of elements to be scraped and inserted if the element notation points to several of them (like elements of the same class).

The use of the plugin is of the dom (Data Object Model) notation, where consecutive dom nodes are stated like node1.node2; for example: element = ‘div.img’. The specific element scrape goes thru ‘#notation’. Example: if you want to scrape several ‘div’ elements of the class ‘red’ (<div class=’red’>…<div>), you need to specify the element attribute this way: element = ‘div#red’.
How to find DOM notation?

But for inexperienced users, how is it possible to find the dom notation of the desired element(s) from the web page? Web Developer Tools are a handy means for this. I would refer you to this paragraph on how to invoke Web Developer Tools in the browser (Google Chrome) and select a single page element to inspect it. As you select it with the ‘loupe’ tool, on the bottom line you’ll see the blue box with the element’s dom notation:


The plugin content

As one who works with web scraping, I was curious about  the means that the plugin uses for scraping. As I looked at the plugin code, it turned out that the plugin acquires a web page through ‘simple_html_dom‘ class:

    require_once(‘simple_html_dom.php’);
    $html = file_get_html($url);
    then the code performs iterations over the designated elements with the set limit

Pitfalls

    Be careful if you put two or more [web-scraper] shortcodes on your website, since downloading other pages will drastically slow the page load speed. Even if you want only a small element, the PHP engine first loads the whole page and then iterates over its elements.
    You need to remember that many pictures on the web are indicated by shortened URLs. So when such an image gets extracted it might be visible to you in this way: , since the URL is shortened and the plugin does not take note of  its base URL.
    The error “Fatal error: Call to a member function find() on a non-object …” will occur if you put this shortcode in a text-overloaded post.

Summary

I’d recommend using this plugin for short posts to be added with other posts’ elements. The use of this plugin is limited though.



Source: http://extract-web-data.com/web-scraper-shortcode-wordpress-plugin-review/

Microsys A1 Website Scraper Review

The A1 scraper by Microsys is a program that is mainly used to scrape websites to extract data in large quantities for later use in webservices. The scraper works to extract text, URLs etc., using multiple Regexes and saving the output into a CSV file. This tool is can be compared with other web harvesting and web scraping services.
How it works
This scraper program works as follows:
Scan mode

    Go to the ScanWebsite tab and enter the site’s URL into the Path subtab.
    Press the ‘Start scan‘ button to cause the crawler to find text, links and other data on this website and cache them.

Important: URLs that you scrape data from have to pass filters defined in both analysis filters and output filters. The defining of those filters can be set at the Analysis filters and Output filters subtabs respectively. They must be set at the website analysis stage (mode).
Extract mode

    Go to the Scraper Options tab
    Enter the Regex(es) into the Regex input area.
    Define the name and path of the output CSV file.
    The scraper automatically finds and extracts the data according to Regex patterns.

The result will be stored in one CSV file for all the given URLs.

There is a need to mention that the set of regular expressions will be run against all the pages scraped.
Some more scraper features

Using the scraper as a website crawler also affords:

    URL filtering.
    Adjustment of the speed of crawling according to service needs rather than server load.

If  you need to extract data from a complex website, just disable Easy mode: out press the  button. A1 Scraper’s full tutorial is available here.
Conclusion

The A1 Scraper is good for mass gathering of URLs, text, etc., with multiple conditions set. However this scraping tool is designed for using only Regex expressions, which can increase the parsing process time greatly.



Source: http://extract-web-data.com/microsys-a1-website-scraper-review/

Visual Web Ripper: Using External Input Data Sources

Sometimes it is necessary to use external data sources to provide parameters for the scraping process. For example, you have a database with a bunch of ASINs and you need to scrape all product information for each one of them. As far as Visual Web Ripper is concerned, an input data source can be used to provide a list of input values to a data extraction project. A data extraction project will be run once for each row of input values.

An input data source is normally used in one of these scenarios:

    To provide a list of input values for a web form
    To provide a list of start URLs
    To provide input values for Fixed Value elements
    To provide input values for scripts

Visual Web Ripper supports the following input data sources:

    SQL Server Database
    MySQL Database
    OleDB Database
    CSV File
    Script (A script can be used to provide data from almost any data source)

To see it in action you can download a sample project that uses an input CSV file with Amazon ASIN codes to generate Amazon start URLs and extract some product data. Place both the project file and the input CSV file in the default Visual Web Ripper project folder (My Documents\Visual Web Ripper\Projects).

For further information please look at the manual topic, explaining how to use an input data source to generate start URLs.


Source: http://extract-web-data.com/visual-web-ripper-using-external-input-data-sources/

Using External Input Data in Off-the-shelf Web Scrapers

There is a question I’ve wanted to shed some light upon for a long time already: “What if I need to scrape several URL’s based on data in some external database?“.

For example, recently one of our visitors asked a very good question (thanks, Ed):

    “I have a large list of amazon.com asin. I would like to scrape 10 or so fields for each asin. Is there any web scraping software available that can read each asin from a database and form the destination url to be scraped like http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/{asin} and scrape the data?”

This question impelled me to investigate this matter. I contacted several web scraper developers, and they kindly provided me with detailed answers that allowed me to bring the following summary to your attention:
Visual Web Ripper

An input data source can be used to provide a list of input values to a data extraction project. A data extraction project will be run once for each row of input values. You can find the additional information here.
Web Content Extractor

You can use the -at”filename” command line option to add new URLs from TXT or CSV file:

    WCExtractor.exe projectfile -at”filename” -s

projectfile: the file name of the project (*.wcepr) to open.
filename – the file name of the CSV or TXT file that contains URLs separated by newlines.
-s – starts the extraction process

You can find some options and examples here.
Mozenda

Since Mozenda is cloud-based, the external data needs to be loaded up into the user’s Mozenda account. That data can then be easily used as part of the data extracting process. You can construct URLs, search for strings that match your inputs, or carry through several data fields from an input collection and add data to it as part of your output. The easiest way to get input data from an external source is to use the API to populate data into a Mozenda collection (in the user’s account). You can also input data in the Mozenda web console by importing a .csv file or importing one through our agent building tool.

Once the data is loaded into the cloud, you simply initiate building a Mozenda web agent and refer to that Data list. By using the Load page action and the variable from the inputs, you can construct a URL like http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/%asin%.
Helium Scraper

Here is a video showing how to do this with Helium Scraper:

The video shows how to use the input data as URLs and as search terms. There are many other ways you could use this data, way too many to fit in a video. Also, if you know SQL, you could run a query to get the data directly from an external MS Access database like
SELECT * FROM [MyTable] IN "C:\MyDatabase.mdb"

Note that the database needs to be a “.mdb” file.
WebSundew Data Extractor
Basically this allows using input data from external data sources. This may be CSV, Excel file or a Database (MySQL, MSSQL, etc). Here you can see how to do this in the case of an external file, but you can do it with a database in a similar way (you just need to write an SQL script that returns the necessary data).
In addition to passing URLs from the external sources you can pass other input parameters as well (input fields, for example).
Screen Scraper

Screen Scraper is really designed to be interoperable with all sorts of databases. We have composed a separate article where you can find a tutorial and a sample project about scraping Amazon products based on a list of their ASINs.

Source: http://extract-web-data.com/using-external-input-data-in-off-the-shelf-web-scrapers/

A simple way to turn a website into JSON

Recently, while surfing the web I stumbled upon an simple web scraping service named Web Scrape Master. It is a kind of RESTful web service that extracts data from a specified web site and returns it to you in JSON format.
How it works

Though I don’t know what this service may be useful for, I still like its simplicity: all you need to do is to make an HTTP GET request, passing all necessary parameters in the query string:
http://webscrapemaster.com/api/?url={url}&xpath={xpath}&attr={attr}&callback={callback}

    url  - the URL of the website you want to scrape
    xpath – xpath determining the data you need to extract
    attr - attribute the name you need to get the value of (optional)
    callback - JSON callback function (optional)

For example, for the following request to our testing ground:

http://webscrapemaster.com/api/?url=http://testing-ground.extract-web-data.com/blocks&xpath=//div[@id=case1]/div[1]/span[1]/div

You will get the following response:

[{"text":"<div class='name'>Dell Latitude D610-1.73 Laptop Wireless Computer</div>","attrs":{"class":"name"}}]
Visual Web Scraper

Also, this service offers a special visual tool for building such requests. All you need to do is to enter the URL of the website and click to the element you need to scrape:
Visual Web Scraper
Conclusion

Though I understand that the developer of this service is attempting to create a simple web scraping service, it is still hard to imagine where it can be useful. The task that the service does can be easily accomplished by means of any language.

Probably if you already have software receiving JSON from the web, and you want to feed it with data from some website, then you may find this service useful. The other possible application is to hide your IP when you do web scraping. If you have other ideas, it would be great if you shared them with us.



Source: http://extract-web-data.com/a-simple-way-to-turn-a-website-into-json/

Selenium IDE and Web Scraping

Selenium is a browser automation framework that includes IDE, Remote Control server and bindings of various flavors including Java, .Net, Ruby, Python and other. In this post we touch on the basic structure of the framework and its application to  Web Scraping.
What is Selenium IDE


Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium scripts. It is implemented as a Firefox plugin, and it allows recording browsers’ interactions in order to edit them. This works well for software tests, composing and debugging. The Selenium Remote Control is a server specific for a particular environment; it causes custom scripts to be implemented for controlled browsers. Selenium deploys on Windows, Linux, and iOS. How various Selenium components are supported with major browsers read here.
What does Selenium do and Web Scraping

Basically Selenium automates browsers. This ability is no doubt to be applied to web scraping. Since browsers (and Selenium) support JavaScript, jQuery and other methods working with dynamic content why not use this mix for benefit in web scraping, rather than to try to catch Ajax events with plain code? The second reason for this kind of scrape automation is browser-fasion data access (though today this is emulated with most libraries).

Yes, Selenium works to automate browsers, but how to control Selenium from a custom script to automate a browser for web scraping? There are Selenium PHP and other language libraries (bindings) providing for scripts to call and use Selenium. It is possible to write Selenium clients (using the libraries) in almost any language we prefer, for example Perl, Python, Java, PHP etc. Those libraries (API), along with a server, the Java written server that invokes browsers for actions, constitute the Selenum RC (Remote Control). Remote Control automatically loads the Selenium Core into the browser to control it. For more details in Selenium components refer to here.



A tough scrape task for programmer

“…cURL is good, but it is very basic.  I need to handle everything manually; I am creating HTTP requests by hand.
This gets difficult – I need to do a lot of work to make sure that the requests that I send are exactly the same as the requests that a browser would
send, both for my sake and for the website’s sake. (For my sake
because I want to get the right data, and for the website’s sake
because I don’t want to cause error messages or other problems on their site because I sent a bad request that messed with their web application).  And if there is any important javascript, I need to imitate it with PHP.
It would be a great benefit to me to be able to control a browser like Firefox with my code. It would solve all my problems regarding the emulation of a real browser…
it seems that Selenium will allow me to do this…” -Ryan S

Yes, that’s what we will consider below.
Scrape with Selenium

In order to create scripts that interact with the Selenium Server (Selenium RC, Selenium Remote Webdriver) or create local Selenium WebDriver script, there is the need to make use of language-specific client drivers (also called Formatters, they are included in the selenium-ide-1.10.0.xpi package). The Selenium servers, drivers and bindings are available at Selenium download page.
The basic recipe for scrape with Selenium:

    Use Chrome or Firefox browsers
    Get Firebug or Chrome Dev Tools (Cntl+Shift+I) in action.
    Install requirements (Remote control or WebDriver, libraries and other)
    Selenium IDE : Record a ‘test’ run thru a site, adding some assertions.
    Export as a Python (other language) script.
    Edit it (loops, data extraction, db input/output)
    Run script for the Remote Control

The short intro Slides for the scraping of tough websites with Python & Selenium are here (as Google Docs slides) and here (Slide Share).
Selenium components for Firefox installation guide

For how to install the Selenium IDE to Firefox see  here starting at slide 21. The Selenium Core and Remote Control installation instructions are there too.
Extracting for dynamic content using jQuery/JavaScript with Selenium

One programmer is doing a similar thing …

1. launch a selenium RC (remote control) server
2. load a page
3. inject the jQuery script
4. select the interested contents using jQuery/JavaScript
5. send back to the PHP client using JSON.

He particularly finds it quite easy and convenient to use jQuery for
screen scraping, rather than using PHP/XPath.
Conclusion

The Selenium IDE is the popular tool for browser automation, mostly for its software testing application, yet also in that Web Scraping techniques for tough dynamic websites may be implemented with IDE along with the Selenium Remote Control server. These are the basic steps for it:

    Record the ‘test‘ browser behavior in IDE and export it as the custom programming language script
    Formatted language script runs on the Remote Control server that forces browser to send HTTP requests and then script catches the Ajax powered responses to extract content.

Selenium based Web Scraping is an easy task for small scale projects, but it consumes a lot of memory resources, since for each request it will launch a new browser instance.



Source: http://extract-web-data.com/selenium-ide-and-web-scraping/

Web Data Extraction Services and Data Collection Form Website Pages

For any business market research and surveys plays crucial role in strategic decision making. Web scrapping and data extraction techniques help you find relevant information and data for your business or personal use. Most of the time professionals manually copy-paste data from web pages or download a whole website resulting in waste of time and efforts.

Instead, consider using web scraping techniques that crawls through thousands of website pages to extract specific information and simultaneously save this information into a database, CSV file, XML file or any other custom format for future reference.

Examples of web data extraction process include:
• Spider a government portal, extracting names of citizens for a survey
• Crawl competitor websites for product pricing and feature data
• Use web scraping to download images from a stock photography site for website design

Automated Data Collection
Web scraping also allows you to monitor website data changes over stipulated period and collect these data on a scheduled basis automatically. Automated data collection helps you discover market trends, determine user behavior and predict how data will change in near future.

Examples of automated data collection include:
• Monitor price information for select stocks on hourly basis
• Collect mortgage rates from various financial firms on daily basis
• Check whether reports on constant basis as and when required

Using web data extraction services you can mine any data related to your business objective, download them into a spreadsheet so that they can be analyzed and compared with ease.

In this way you get accurate and quicker results saving hundreds of man-hours and money!

With web data extraction services you can easily fetch product pricing information, sales leads, mailing database, competitors data, profile data and many more on a consistent basis.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Web-Data-Extraction-Services-and-Data-Collection-Form-Website-Pages&id=4860417

Control Your Data Entry Cost

I am sure all will agree that a company's main motto would be to boost up the revenue and to derogate the expenses, to save time and to focus on the core business. For maintaining the data of the company with the all above can be achieved by using outsourcing method. The main benefits of outsourcing are cost effectiveness. This is brought about by the reduction in man power, infrastructure, investments on technologies and software.

Offshore outsourcing is still more cost effective as same benefits are obtained with the same quality level at much lower cost. It reduces the burden of standardizing the infrastructure and updating the software needed for the data maintenance by the company itself. Outsourcing improves the productivity level with quality and greatly changes the magnitude of profit level. The cut off of salary for the professional man power to maintain the data is the best cost control for a company. The capital investment is saved by removing off the expenditure for unnecessary fixed investments.

The best benefit from outsourcing can be obtained by choosing an outsourcing partner who is specifically specialized in particular business process. In this case the partner will be able to give out more proficient and good quality services. It also provides faster deliverables. Countries like U.S, U.K benefit the best out of outsourcing in offshore countries like India as they have the zone advantage. During the off time of the office, any critical work is done by the outsourcing partner and hence gives the business a competitive advantage.

Data Entry Services - VServe Solution provides services such as data entry, data capture, data processing, document management and data transcription.

Susan from Vserve Solution, working as Business Development Manager



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Control-Your-Data-Entry-Cost&id=2375184

Data Mining, Not Just a Method But a Technique

Web data mining is segregating probable clients out of huge information available on the Internet by performing various searches. It could be well organized and structured, or raw, depending on the use of the data. Web data mining could be done using a simple database program or investing money in a costly program.

Start collecting basic contact information of probable clients, such as: names, addresses, landline and cell phone numbers, email addresses and education or occupation if required.

CART and CHAID data mining

While collecting data you will find that tree-shaped structures that represent decisions. These derived decisions give rules for the classification of data collected. Precise decision tree methods include Classification and Regression Trees also know as CART data mining and Chi Square Automatic Interaction Detection also known as CHAID data mining. CART and CHAID data mining are decision tree techniques used for classification of data collected. They provide a set of rules that could be applied to unclassified data collected in prediction. CART segments a dataset creating two-way splits whereas CHAID segments using chi square tests creating multi-way splits. CART requires less data preparation compared to CHAID.

Understanding customer's actions

Keep a track of customer's actions like: what does he buy, when does he buy, why does he buy, what is the use of his buying, etc. Knowing such simple things about your customer will help you to understand needs of your customer better and thus process of data mining services will be easier and quality data would be mined. This will increase your personal relations with your customer which would finally result in a better professional relationship.

Following demography

Mine the data as per demography, dependent on geography as well as socio economic background of business location. You can use government statistics as the source of your data collection. Keeping it in mind you can go ahead with the understanding of the community existing and thus the data required.

Use your informal conversation in serving your clients better

Use minute details of your conversation and understanding with your customers to serve them. If essential, conduct surveys, send a professional gift or use some other object that helps you understand better in fulfilling customer needs. This will increase the bonding between you and your customer and you will be able to serve your customer better in providing data mining services.

Insert the collect information in a desktop database. More the information is collected you will find that you can prepare specific templates in feeding information. Using a desktop database, it is easier to make changes later on as and when required.

Maintaining privacy

While performing, it is essential to ensure that you or your team members are not violating privacy laws in gathering or providing the data information. Once trust is lost, you may also loose the customer, because trust is the base of any relationship, let it be a business relation.

To fulfill your needs as a customer in data mining, you will not find a better source than http://www.onlinewebresearchservices.com. Help us to serve you better.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining,-Not-Just-a-Method-But-a-Technique&id=5416129

How to Rescue Data From Your Damaged Hard Drive

A damaged hard disk drive is one of the most unpleasant types of hardware failure. No, I don't mean that a burned processor or a damaged memory block are more enjoyable. Not at all - they are also disasters and in terms of money generally it is more expensive to replace a processor than to replace a hard drive but damaged hard drives have one very irritating property - you lose not only your hardware but also all or some of your data. Data is priceless and if you don't have a backup copy of it, then you are lost.

However, not all hard drive damages are that bad. There are cases when the hard drive is damaged but the data on it is alive. So, if your hard drive crashes, don't panic but hope for the best - i.e. the drive might have become an obsolete piece of machinery but at least your data is not buried inside. There are different strategies for evacuating data from a damaged hard drive and which one you can use depends on the sort of damage, as we'll see next.

What Is a Damaged Hard Drive A damaged hard drive come come in many flavors. In addition to that, there are many cases when the drive is not damaged but due to some reason the data can't be accessed. For a non-specialist all these cases might look the same - I can't access my files, so my hard drive must have gone off, while in reality the hard drive is perfectly OK but your data is inaccessible because of some prosaic reason.

Without getting into technical details, the shortest (and hardly most precise) explanation of a completely damaged hard drive is that this hard drive can't be accessed with any means even by a qualified PC technician. So, unless you are a PC technician yourself, you can't determine on your own if the hard drive is totally dead or not. However, since there are many cases when a drive is still alive but it can't be accessed due to a variety of reasons (most frequently software issues) you can try some of the approaches in the next section and see if they work. Even if they don't work, they will do no harm, but this does not mean you shouldn't be cautious when applying them.

What You Can Do on Your Own One of the cases when the hard drive is not physically damaged but is unaccessible due to software reasons is when the partition on which the data resides is inaccessible, or at least not from your operating system. In this case you can use an alternative operating system, for instance a Live CD with a Linux distribution and see if you will have more luck accessing the partition. This will work, if the partition table on your computer is not totally messed up. If you see that the data is still unaccessible, don't attempt to mess up with the partition table because you can make things worse. Instead, hurry up and find a PC technician and pray that he or she will be able to recover your data for you.

Another case when the data might still be alive is when the drive has been formatted on a high level. If the drive has been formatted on a low level, the extraction techniques will not work because the data has been physically destroyed. There are many tools to unformat a formatted drive. Most of the tools are paid ones but you can find free as well. Hiren's Boot CD comes with a bundle of data recovery tools and I generally prefer to use them than any other tools.

Software problems are common but hardware problems - I.e. bad sectors or a damaged controller are also not an exception. Unfortunately, there isn't much you can do about them. If data is sucked by a bad sector, then in 99% of the cases it is gone for good. The 1% stands for the rare chance that you have made copies of exactly this file and the copy is not on a bad sector but this is really a lucky exception. You can take the hard drive to a service but it is unlikely that they will be able to do much.

Another technique you can try on your own without risk to make the damage more severe is to go to your HDD manufacturer's site and see if they provide retrieval tools. Usually hard drive manufacturers provide diagnostic tools but if you are lucky, chances are that you will find a data retrieval tool as well. Very often the diagnostic tools themselves not only check for problems but they also can fix some issues, so they could help you save your data as well.

The above mentioned techniques to extract data from a damaged hard drive are only a small fraction of what can be done. However, many of the other techniques are more complicated and they do require some knowledge about a hard drive's architecture, so I wouldn't recommend you to apply them because you can make a lot of damage. Some of the techniques that require opening the computer case or messing with the parts of the disk itself are too dangerous to try at home. No, you will hardly destroy your home but you can surely further damage the hard drive, making it impossible even for a technician to help you. Additionally, you can void the warranty for the computer system, which is hardly what you want to achieve.

Take the Hard Drive to a PC Technician If you have tried to rescue the data from your hard drive on your own to no avail, you have no choice but to take it to a service. A PC service has more equipment than the standard user and there is a chance they will be able to help you but still, don't expect miracles. In some cases data extraction services could be free of charge, especially if you have bought the hard drive from them and the warranty has not expired yet but in other cases you will have to pay.

As you probably guess, fees vary. As a rule, the cost depends on the volume of data that needs to be extracted but generally it does not cost a fortune - you might be able find somebody to do it for around $200. Still, if your drive has serious physical damages, even if you go to a more expensive data rescue lab, there is no guarantee that your data can and will be restored.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?How-to-Rescue-Data-From-Your-Damaged-Hard-Drive&id=1620693

Data Mining Models - Tom's Ten Data Tips

What is a model? A model is a purposeful simplification of reality. Models can take on many forms. A built-to-scale look alike, a mathematical equation, a spreadsheet, or a person, a scene, and many other forms. In all cases, the model uses only part of reality, that's why it's a simplification. And in all cases, the way one reduces the complexity of real life, is chosen with a purpose. The purpose is to focus on particular characteristics, at the expense of losing extraneous detail.

If you ask my son, Carmen Elektra is the ultimate model. She replaces an image of women in general, and embodies a particular attractive one at that. A model for a wind tunnel, may look like the real car, at least the outside, but doesn't need an engine, brakes, real tires, etc. The purpose is to focus on aerodynamics, so this model only needs to have an identical outside shape.

Data Mining models, reduce intricate relations in data. They're a simplified representation of characteristic patterns in data. This can be for 2 reasons. Either to predict or describe mechanics, e.g. "what application form characteristics are indicative of a future default credit card applicant?". Or secondly, to give insight in complex, high dimensional patterns. An example of the latter could be a customer segmentation. Based on clustering similar patterns of database attributes one defines groups like: high income/ high spending/ need for credit, low income/ need for credit, high income/ frugal/ no need for credit, etc.

1. A Predictive Model Relies On The Future Being Like The Past

As Yogi Berra said: "Predicting is hard, especially when it's about the future". The same holds for data mining. What is commonly referred to as "predictive modeling", is in essence a classification task.

Based on the (big) assumption that the future will resemble the past, we classify future occurrences for their similarity with past cases. Then we 'predict' they will behave like past look-alikes.

2. Even A 'Purely' Predictive Model Should Always (Be) Explain(ed)

Predictive models are generally used to provide scores (likelihood to churn) or decisions (accept yes/no). Regardless, they should always be accompanied by explanations that give insight in the model. This is for two reasons:

    buy-in from business stakeholders to act on predictions is of eminent importance, and gains from understanding
    peculiarities in data do sometimes arise, and may become obvious from the model's explanation


3. It's Not About The Model, But The Results It Generates

Models are developed for a purpose. All too often, data miners fall in love with their own methodology (or algorithms). Nobody cares. Clients (not customers) who should benefit from using a model are interested in only one thing: "What's in it for me?"

Therefore, the single most important thing on a data miner's mind should be: "How do I communicate the benefits of using this model to my client?" This calls for patience, persistence, and the ability to explain in business terms how using the model will affect the company's bottom line. Practice explaining this to your grandmother, and you will come a long way towards becoming effective.

4. How Do You Measure The 'Success' Of A Model?

There are really two answers to this question. An important and simple one, and an academic and wildly complex one. What counts the most is the result in business terms. This can range from percentage of response to a direct marketing campaign, number of fraudulent claims intercepted, average sale per lead, likelihood of churn, etc.

The academic issue is how to determine the improvement a model gives over the best alternative course of business action. This turns out to be an intriguing, ill understood question. This is a frontier of future scientific study, and mathematical theory. Bias-Variance Decomposition is one of those mathematical frontiers.

5. A Model Predicts Only As Good As The Data That Go In To It

The old "Garbage In, Garbage Out" (GiGo), is hackneyed but true (unfortunately). But there is more to this topic. Across a broad range of industries, channels, products, and settings we have found a common pattern. Input (predictive) variables can be ordered from transactional to demographic. From transient and volatile to stable.

In general, transactional variables that relate to (recent) activity hold the most predictive power. Less dynamic variables, like demographics, tend to be weaker predictors. The downside is that model performance (predictive "power") on the basis of transactional and behavioral variables usually degrades faster over time. Therefore such models need to be updated or rebuilt more often.

6. Models Need To Be Monitored For Performance Degradence

It is adamant to always, always follow up model deployment by reviewing its effectiveness. Failing to do so, should be likened to driving a car with blinders on. Reckless.

To monitor how a model keeps performing over time, you check whether the prediction as generated by the model, matches the patterns of response when deployed in real life. Although no rocket science, this can be tricky to accomplish in practice.

7. Classification Accuracy Is Not A Sufficient Indicator Of Model Quality

Contrary to common belief, even among data miners, no single number of classification accuracy (R2, Gini-coefficient, lift, etc.) is valid to quantify model quality. The reason behind this has nothing to do with the model itself, but rather with the fact that a model derives its quality from being applied.

The quality of model predictions calls for at least two numbers: one number to indicate accuracy of prediction (these are commonly the only numbers supplied), and another number to reflect its generalizability. The latter indicates resilience to changing multi-variate distributions, the degree to which the model will hold up as reality changes very slowly. Hence, it's measured by the multi-variate representativeness of the input variables in the final model.

8. Exploratory Models Are As Good As the Insight They Give

There are many reasons why you want to give insight in the relations found in the data. In all cases, the purpose is to make a large amount of data and exponential number of relations palatable. You knowingly ignore detail and point to "interesting" and potentially actionable highlights.

The key here is, as Einstein pointed out already, to have a model that is as simple as possible, but not too simple. It should be as simple as possible in order to impose structure on complexity. At the same time, it shouldn't be too simple so that the image of reality becomes overly distorted.

9. Get A Decent Model Fast, Rather Than A Great One Later

In almost all business settings, it is far more important to get a reasonable model deployed quickly, instead of working to improve it. This is for three reasons:

    A working model is making money; a model under construction is not
    When a model is in place, you have a chance to "learn from experience", the same holds for even a mild improvement - is it working as expected?
    The best way to manage models is by getting agile in updating. No better practice than doing it... :)


10. Data Mining Models - What's In It For Me?

Who needs data mining models? As the world around us becomes ever more digitized, the number of possible applications abound. And as data mining software has come of age, you don't need a PhD in statistics anymore to operate such applications.

In almost every instance where data can be used to make intelligent decisions, there's a fair chance that models could help. When 40 years ago underwriters were replaced by scorecards (a particular kind of data mining model), nobody could believe that such a simple set of decision rules could be effective. Fortunes have been made by early adopters since then.

Further reading

Some excellent books on Data Mining:

Dorian Pyle (2003) Business Modeling and Data Mining. ISBN# 155860653-X

Dorian Pyle (1999) Data Preparation for Data Mining. ISBN# 1558605290

Michael Berry & Gordon Linoff (2000) Mastering Data Mining. ISBN# 0471331236

Source Data Mining Models - Tom's Ten Data Tips

Tom Breur: Biographical Sketch

Tom Breur is a consultant out of deep passion for his work.
He can be profoundly analytic, in his passionate quest to drive out the deepest business issues and the nexus point of a business model. It’s all about finding where the least effort will generate the most results.

Once the business challenge becomes clear Tom loves to roll up his sleeves and get his ‘hands dirty’.

Be it data analysis, market research, data mining or database work. Once the hands-on work gets started, his eyes begin to flicker, and he has a tendency to get carried away.

Tom has an academic background in Psychology, an education he took up twice. Initially he majored in Clinical Psychology (1986), years later he went back to college to study Economic Psychology (1996) with an emphasis on quantitative methods.




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Utilize Online Data Entry Services From India For Extended Profits

Numerous companies are seeking help for data entry services in order to better manage their company database. Many changes and innovations have taken place in this field that has greatly facilitated and accelerated often tedious and time consuming processes. There are a multitude of data entry companies offering useful solutions to businesses of all types. Hiring an online data entry company in India is an economical option. These outsourcing companies provide high quality work to businesses around the world.

Many firms have started passing their data entry work on to third party firms in an effort to save on overhead costs. The burden of employing a full time data entry associate on a salary basis and providing them with all the benefits of regular employees is immense, whether the work load is large of small for a particular month. Hiring a consultant will enable you to only incur costs when necessary.

Data is a very important part of any business. Therefore it is critical that it is handled with experienced hands and skills. Well managed data can be used in an endless number of ways to better plan and manage the undertakings of a business. As a part of data entry services, data conversion is gaining popularity. The companies are using the latest techniques and tools for designing data entry solutions. In order to make data useful for anyone, its conversion is important. Data that requires a longer duration of processing time should be outsourced for better efficiency of information flow.

Different types of businesses make use of these services. They primarily have an immense database to manage, for which to India is a cost effective option. For instance, pharmaceutical companies, educational institutes, law firms, E-Commerce sites, and others make use to data entry services for higher profits.

Outsourced data entry services have been very beneficial for companies by increasing sales, yet lowering labor expenses. They help in expanding the client base internationally, which enables global access to international customers with ease. Generally the data that is complex and takes longer processing times should be outsourced for better, timelier results. Some businesses can even take advantage of data conversion, document processing, and catalog development if they need it.

There are many advantages of outsourcing data entry services to developing countries like India. Here the workforce is cheap yet highly skilled. Thus, businesses can get better quality of work at relatively lower prices in comparison to companies in developed countries. There are a tremendous number of data entry service providers. One of these firms will be a great tool to take your business to the next level.




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Unleash the Hidden Potential of Your Business Data With Data Mining and Extraction Services

Every business, small or large, is continuously amassing data about customers, employees and nearly every process in their business cycle. Although all management staff utilize data collected from their business as a basis for decision making in areas such as marketing, forecasting, planning and trouble-shooting, very often they are just barely scratching the surface. Manual data analysis is time-consuming and error-prone, and its limited functions result in the overlooking of valuable information that improve bottom-lines. Often, the sheer quantity of data prevents accurate and useful analysis by those without the necessary technology and experience. It is an unfortunate reality that much of this data goes to waste and companies often never realize that a valuable resource is being left untapped.

Automated data mining services allow your company to tap into the latent potential of large volumes of raw data and convert it into information that can be used in decision-making. While the use of the latest software makes data mining and data extraction fast and affordable, experienced professional data analysts are a key part of the data mining services offered by our company. Making the most of your data involves more than automatically generated reports from statistical software. It takes analysis and interpretation skills that can only be performed by experienced data analysis experts to ensure that your business databases are translated into information that you can easily comprehend and use in almost every aspect of your business.

Who Can Benefit From Data Mining Services?

If you are wondering what types of companies can benefit from data extraction services, the answer is virtually every type of business. This includes organizations dealing in customer service, sales and marketing, financial products, research and insurance.

How is Raw Data Converted to Useful Information?

There are several steps in data mining and extraction, but the most important thing for you as a business owner is to be assured that, throughout the process, the confidentiality of your data is our primary concern. Upon receiving your data, it is converted into the necessary format so that it can be entered into a data warehouse system. Next, it is compiled into a database, which is then sifted through by data mining experts to identify relevant data. Our trained and experienced staff then scan and analyze your data using a variety of methods to identify association or relationships between variables; clusters and classes, to identify correlations and groups within your data; and patterns, which allow trends to be identified and predictions to be made. Finally, the results are compiled in the form of written reports, visual data and spreadsheets, according to the needs of your business.

Our team of data mining, extraction and analyses experts have already helped a great number of businesses to tap into the potential of their raw data, with our speedy, cost-efficient and confidential services. Contact us today for more information on how our data mining and extraction services can help your business.




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Beneficial Data Collection Services

Internet is becoming the biggest source for information gathering. Varieties of search engines are available over the World Wide Web which helps in searching any kind of information easily and quickly. Every business needs relevant data for their decision making for which market research plays a crucial role. One of the services booming very fast is the data collection services. This data mining service helps in gathering relevant data which is hugely needed for your business or personal use.

Traditionally, data collection has been done manually which is not very feasible in case of bulk data requirement. Although people still use manual copying and pasting of data from Web pages or download a complete Web site which is shear wastage of time and effort. Instead, a more reliable and convenient method is automated data collection technique. There is a web scraping techniques that crawls through thousands of web pages for the specified topic and simultaneously incorporates this information into a database, XML file, CSV file, or other custom format for future reference. Few of the most commonly used web data extraction processes are websites which provide you information about the competitor's pricing and featured data; spider is a government portal that helps in extracting the names of citizens for an investigation; websites which have variety of downloadable images.

Aside, there is a more sophisticated method of automated data collection service. Here, you can easily scrape the web site information on daily basis automatically. This method greatly helps you in discovering the latest market trends, customer behavior and the future trends. Few of the major examples of automated data collection solutions are price monitoring information; collection of data of various financial institutions on a daily basis; verification of different reports on a constant basis and use them for taking better and progressive business decisions.

While using these service make sure you use the right procedure. Like when you are retrieving data download it in a spreadsheet so that the analysts can do the comparison and analysis properly. This will also help in getting accurate results in a faster and more refined manner.




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Outsource Your Work To Data Entry Services To Convert Your Paperwork To An Electronic Format

Among the many services that are outsourced, data entry services are much in demand. While the job profile might seem simple it does in fact require a certain degree of exactness and an eye for detail. Maintaining and handling the client confidentiality is also very important. Data needs to be processed and the first step is always entering the information in the system. An operator needs to be careful while entering information in the system as often this data is used to collate data and for statistical reports and is also the foundation for all the information on the company. These services include much more than just basic information in this technology driven age. An operator today has projects that require Image entry, card Entry, legal document's entry, medical claim entry, entry for online survey forms, online indexing, copying, pasting and sorting of data etc.

A Data entry operator is competent at handling online as well as offline data and even to excel. Specialized services like Image editing, image clipping and cropping services are also available with this service. BPO companies offer these services at very cost effective rates and the work is processed 24x7 ensuring that the work is constantly auctioned. Many data sensitive projects are also completed even in a 24 hour. There are many online services to choose from and each specializes in various features with ample industry experience. These services use the latest technology to ensure that paperwork is processed in the shorted possible time and is converted into electronic data that is easier to store.

A professional service must be able to offer the following features like data conversion and even storage, effective management of databases and an adherence to turnaround times, 100% accuracy of the data entered, 24x7 webs and phone support, a secure and accurate data capture, data extraction and data processing and importantly a cost effective solution for quality data services. A professional company will also ensure that there is a Quality Assurance department monitoring the quality of the work being handled with relevant feedback to both the client and to the operator.

Before deciding on outsourcing your work to a data entry service ensures that the company is known for its reliability and quality. A company that offers data backup is also a good option as it will take care of all the paperwork while forwarding the converted electronic data back. This paperwork could be extracted in the case of a claim or any legal requirement. There are many BPO companies online advertising their services, browse through their features and find one that suits your requirements.

The writer is a Data entry service provider who specializes as data entry operator. Inquire for a free quote for data entry services. If you want services as data entry operators or data entry for your organizations. We are able to provide data entry services at affordable low cost.




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Internet Data Mining - How Does it Help Businesses?

Internet has become an indispensable medium for people to conduct different types of businesses and transactions too. This has given rise to the employment of different internet data mining tools and strategies so that they could better their main purpose of existence on the internet platform and also increase their customer base manifold.

Internet data-mining encompasses various processes of collecting and summarizing different data from various websites or webpage contents or make use of different login procedures so that they could identify various patterns. With the help of internet data-mining it becomes extremely easy to spot a potential competitor, pep up the customer support service on the website and make it more customers oriented.

There are different types of internet data_mining techniques which include content, usage and structure mining. Content mining focuses more on the subject matter that is present on a website which includes the video, audio, images and text. Usage mining focuses on a process where the servers report the aspects accessed by users through the server access logs. This data helps in creating an effective and an efficient website structure. Structure mining focuses on the nature of connection of the websites. This is effective in finding out the similarities between various websites.

Also known as web data_mining, with the aid of the tools and the techniques, one can predict the potential growth in a selective market regarding a specific product. Data gathering has never been so easy and one could make use of a variety of tools to gather data and that too in simpler methods. With the help of the data mining tools, screen scraping, web harvesting and web crawling have become very easy and requisite data can be put readily into a usable style and format. Gathering data from anywhere in the web has become as simple as saying 1-2-3. Internet data-mining tools therefore are effective predictors of the future trends that the business might take.

If you are interested to know something more on Web Data Mining and other details, you are welcome to the Screen Scraping Technology site.



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The Need for Specialised Data Mining Techniques for Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is not exactly a new version of the Web, but rather a way to describe a new generation of interactive websites centred on the user. These are websites that offer

interactive information sharing, as well as collaboration - a case in point being wikis and blogs - and is now expanding to other areas as well. These new sites are the result of new technologies and new ideas and are on the cutting edge of Web development. Due to their novelty, they create a rather interesting challenge for data mining.

Data mining is simply a process of finding patterns in masses of data. There is such a vast plethora of information out there on the Web that it is necessary to use data mining tools to make sense of it. Traditional data mining techniques are not very effective when used on these new Web 2.0 sites because the user interface is so varied. Since Web 2.0 sites are created largely by user-supplied content, there is even more data to mine for valuable information. Having said that, the additional freedom in the format ensures that it is much more difficult to sift through the content to find what is usable.The data available is very valuable, so where there is a new platform, there must be new techniques developed for mining the data. The trick is that the data mining methods must themselves be flexible as the sites they are targeting are flexible. In the initial days of the World Wide Web, which was referred to as Web 1.0, data mining programs knew where to look for the desired information. Web 2.0 sites lack structure, meaning there is no single spot for the mining program to target. It must be able to scan and sift through all of the user-generated content to find what is needed. The upside is that there is a lot more data out there, which means more and more accurate results if the data can be properly utilized. The downside is that with all that data, if the selection criteria are not specific enough, the results will be meaningless. Too much of a good thing is definitely a bad thing. Wikis and blogs have been around long enough now that enough research has been carried out to understand them better. This research can now be used, in turn, to devise the best possible data mining methods. New algorithms are being developed that will allow data mining applications to analyse this data and return useful. Another problem is that there are many cul-de-sacs on the internet now, where groups of people share information freely, but only behind walls/barriers that keep it away from the genera results.

The main challenge in developing these algorithms does not lie with finding the data, because there is too much of it. The challenge is filtering out irrelevant data to get to the meaningful one. At this point none of the techniques are perfected. This makes Web 2.0 data mining an exciting and frustrating field, and yet another challenge in the never ending series of technological hurdles that have stemmed from the internet. There are numerous problems to overcome. One is the inability to rely on keywords, which used to be the best method to search. This does not allow for an understanding of context or sentiment associated with the keywords which can drastically vary the meaning of the keyword population. Social networking sites are a good example of this, where you can share information with everyone you know, but it is more difficult for that information to proliferate outside of those circles. This is good in terms of protecting privacy, but it does not add to the collective knowledge base and it can lead to a skewed understanding of public sentiment based on what social structures you have entry into. Attempts to use artificial intelligence have been less than successful because it is not adequately focused in its methodology. Data mining depends on the collection of data and sorting the results to create reports on the individual metrics that are the focus of interest. The size of the data sets are simply too large for traditional computational techniques to be able to tackle them. That is why a new answer needs to be found. Data mining is an important necessity for managing the backhaul of the internet. As Web 2.0 grows exponentially, it is increasingly hard to keep track of everything that is out there and summarize and synthesize it in a useful way. Data mining is necessary for companies to be able to really understand what customers like and want so that they can create products to meet these needs. In the increasingly aggressive global market, companies also need the reports resulting from data mining to remain competitive. If they are unable to keep track of the market and stay abreast of popular trends, they will not survive. The solution has to come from open source with options to scale databases depending on needs. There are companies that are now working on these ideas and are sharing the results with others to further improve them. So, just as open source and collective information sharing of Web 2.0 created these new data mining challenges, it will be the collective effort that solves the problems as well.

It is important to view this as a process of constant improvement, not one where an answer will be absolute for all time. Since its advent, the internet has changed quite significantly as well as the way users interact with it. Data mining will always be a critical part of corporate internet usage and its methods will continue to evolve just as the Web and its content does.

There is a huge incentive for creating better data mining solutions to tackle the complexities of Web 2.0. For this reason, several companies exist just for the purpose of analysing and creating solutions to the data mining problem. They find eager buyers for their applications in companies which are desperate for information on markets and potential customers. The companies in question do not simply want more data, they want better data. This requires a system that can classify and group data, and then make sense of the results.While the data mining process is expensive to start with, it is well worth for a retail company because it provides insight into the market and thus enables quick decisions.The speed at which a company which has insightful information on the marketplace can react to changes, gives it a huge advantage over the competition. Not only can the company react quickly, it is likely to steer itself in the right direction if its information is based on updated data.Advanced data mining will allow companies not only to make snap decisions, but also to plan long range strategies, based on the direction the marketplace is heading. Data mining brings the company closer to its customers. The real winners here, are the companies that have now discovered that they can make a living by improving the existing data mining techniques. They have filled a niche that was only created recently, which no one could have foreseen and have done quite a, good job at it.




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Data Extraction Services - A Helpful Hand For Large Organization

The data extraction is the way to extract and to structure data from not structured and semi-structured electronic documents, as found on the web and in various data warehouses. Data extraction is extremely useful for the huge organizations which deal with considerable amounts of data, daily, which must be transformed into significant information and be stored for the use this later on.

Your company with tons of data but it is difficult to control and convert the data into useful information. Without right information at the right time and based on half of accurate information, decision makers with a company waste time by making wrong strategic decisions. In high competing world of businesses, the essential statistics such as information customer, the operational figures of the competitor and the sales figures inter-members play a big role in the manufacture of the strategic decisions. It can help you to take strategic business decisions that can shape your business' goals..

Outsourcing companies provide custom made services to the client's requirements. A few of the areas where it can be used to generate better sales leads, extract and harvest product pricing data, capture financial data, acquire real estate data, conduct market research , survey and analysis, conduct product research and analysis and duplicate an online database..

The different types of Data Extraction Services:

    Database Extraction:
    Reorganized data from multiple databases such as statistics about competitor's products, pricing and latest offers and customer opinion and reviews can be extracted and stored as per the requirement of company.
    Web Data Extraction:
    Web Data Extraction is also known as data Extraction which is usually referred to the practice of extract or reading text data from a targeted website.

Businesses have now realized about the huge benefits they can get by outsourcing their services. Then outsourcing is profitable option for business. Since all projects are custom based to suit the exact needs of the customer, huge savings in terms of time, money and infrastructure are among the many advantages that outsourcing brings.

Advantages of Outsourcing Data Extraction Services:

    Improved technology scalability
    Skilled and qualified technical staff who are proficient in English
    Advanced infrastructure resources
    Quick turnaround time
    Cost-effective prices
    Secure Network systems to ensure data safety
    Increased market coverage

By outsourcing, you can definitely increase your competitive advantages. Outsourcing of services helps businesses to manage their data effectively, which in turn would enable them to experience an increase in profits.



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Web Data Extraction Services

Web Data Extraction from Dynamic Pages includes some of the services that may be acquired through outsourcing. It is possible to siphon information from proven websites through the use of Data Scrapping software. The information is applicable in many areas in business. It is possible to get such solutions as data collection, screen scrapping, email extractor and Web Data Mining services among others from companies providing websites such as Scrappingexpert.com.

Data mining is common as far as outsourcing business is concerned. Many companies are outsource data mining services and companies dealing with these services can earn a lot of money, especially in the growing business regarding outsourcing and general internet business. With web data extraction, you will pull data in a structured organized format. The source of the information will even be from an unstructured or semi-structured source.

In addition, it is possible to pull data which has originally been presented in a variety of formats including PDF, HTML, and test among others. The web data extraction service therefore, provides a diversity regarding the source of information. Large scale organizations have used data extraction services where they get large amounts of data on a daily basis. It is possible for you to get high accuracy of information in an efficient manner and it is also affordable.

Web data extraction services are important when it comes to collection of data and web-based information on the internet. Data collection services are very important as far as consumer research is concerned. Research is turning out to be a very vital thing among companies today. There is need for companies to adopt various strategies that will lead to fast means of data extraction, efficient extraction of data, as well as use of organized formats and flexibility.

In addition, people will prefer software that provides flexibility as far as application is concerned. In addition, there is software that can be customized according to the needs of customers, and these will play an important role in fulfilling diverse customer needs. Companies selling the particular software therefore, need to provide such features that provide excellent customer experience.

It is possible for companies to extract emails and other communications from certain sources as far as they are valid email messages. This will be done without incurring any duplicates. You will extract emails and messages from a variety of formats for the web pages, including HTML files, text files and other formats. It is possible to carry these services in a fast reliable and in an optimal output and hence, the software providing such capability is in high demand. It can help businesses and companies quickly search contacts for the people to be sent email messages.

It is also possible to use software to sort large amount of data and extract information, in an activity termed as data mining. This way, the company will realize reduced costs and saving of time and increasing return on investment. In this practice, the company will carry out Meta data extraction, scanning data, and others as well.

please visit Data extraction services to take care of your online as well as offline projects and to get your work done in given time frame with exceptional quality.



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Outsource Data Mining Services to Offshore Data Entry Company

Companies in India offer complete solution services for all type of data mining services.

Data Mining Services and Web research services offered, help businesses get critical information for their analysis and marketing campaigns. As this process requires professionals with good knowledge in internet research or online research, customers can take advantage of outsourcing their Data Mining, Data extraction and Data Collection services to utilize resources at a very competitive price.

In the time of recession every company is very careful about cost. So companies are now trying to find ways to cut down cost and outsourcing is good option for reducing cost. It is essential for each size of business from small size to large size organization. Data entry is most famous work among all outsourcing work. To meet high quality and precise data entry demands most corporate firms prefer to outsource data entry services to offshore countries like India.

In India there are number of companies which offer high quality data entry work at cheapest rate. Outsourcing data mining work is the crucial requirement of all rapidly growing Companies who want to focus on their core areas and want to control their cost.

Why outsource your data entry requirements?

Easy and fast communication: Flexibility in communication method is provided where they will be ready to talk with you at your convenient time, as per demand of work dedicated resource or whole team will be assigned to drive the project.

Quality with high level of Accuracy: Experienced companies handling a variety of data-entry projects develop whole new type of quality process for maintaining best quality at work.

Turn Around Time: Capability to deliver fast turnaround time as per project requirements to meet up your project deadline, dedicated staff(s) can work 24/7 with high level of accuracy.

Affordable Rate: Services provided at affordable rates in the industry. For minimizing cost, customization of each and every aspect of the system is undertaken for efficiently handling work.

Outsourcing Service Providers are outsourcing companies providing business process outsourcing services specializing in data mining services and data entry services. Team of highly skilled and efficient people, with a singular focus on data processing, data mining and data entry outsourcing services catering to data entry projects of a varied nature and type.

Why outsource data mining services?

360 degree Data Processing Operations
Free Pilots Before You Hire
Years of Data Entry and Processing Experience
Domain Expertise in Multiple Industries
Best Outsourcing Prices in Industry
Highly Scalable Business Infrastructure
24X7 Round The Clock Services

The expertise management and teams have delivered millions of processed data and records to customers from USA, Canada, UK and other European Countries and Australia.

Outsourcing companies specialize in data entry operations and guarantee highest quality & on time delivery at the least expensive prices.



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Know What the Truth Behind Data Mining Outsourcing Service

We came to that, what we call the information age where industries are like useful data needed for decision-making, the creation of products - among other essential uses for business. Information mining and converting them to useful information is a part of this trend that allows companies to reach their optimum potential. However, many companies that do not meet even one deal with data mining question because they are simply overwhelmed with other important tasks. This is where data mining outsourcing comes in.

There have been many definitions to introduced, but it can be simply explained as a process that involves sorting through large amounts of raw data to extract valuable information needed by industries and enterprises in various fields. In most cases this is done by professionals, professional organizations and financial analysts. He has seen considerable growth in the number of sectors or groups that enter my self.
There are a number of reasons why there is a rapid growth in data mining outsourcing service subscriptions. Some of them are presented below:

A wide range of services

Many companies are turning to information mining outsourcing, because they cover a wide range of services. These services include, but are not limited to data from web applications congregation database, collect contact information from different sites, extract data from websites using the software, the sort of stories from sources news, information and accumulate commercial competitors.

Many companies fall

Many industries benefit because it is fast and realistic. The information extracted by data mining service providers of outsourcing used in crucial decisions in the field of direct marketing, e-commerce, customer relationship management, health, scientific tests and other experimental work, telecommunications, financial services, and a whole lot more.

A lot of advantages

Subscribe data mining outsourcing services it's offers many benefits, as providers assures customers to render services to world standards. They strive to work with improved technologies, scalability, sophisticated infrastructure, resources, timeliness, cost, the system safer for the security of information and increased market coverage.

Outsourcing allows companies to focus their core business and can improve overall productivity. Not surprisingly, information mining outsourcing has been a first choice of many companies - to propel the business to higher profits.



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Data Mining As a Process

The data mining process is also known as knowledge discovery. It can be defined as the process of analyzing data from different perspectives and then summarizing the data into useful information in order to improve the revenue and cut the costs. The process enables categorization of data and the summary of the relationships is identified. When viewed in technical terms, the process can be defined as finding correlations or patterns in large relational databases. In this article, we look at how data mining works its innovations, the needed technological infrastructures and the tools such as phone validation.

Data mining is a relatively new term used in the data collection field. The process is very old but has evolved over the time. Companies have been able to use computers to shift over the large amounts of data for many years. The process has been used widely by the marketing firms in conducting market research. Through analysis, it is possible to define the regularity of customers shopping. How the items are bought. It is also possible to collect information needed for the establishment of revenue increase platform. Nowadays, what aides the process is the affordable and easy disk storage, computer processing power and applications developed.

Data extraction is commonly used by the companies that are after maintaining a stronger customer focus no matter where they are engaged. Most companies are engaged in retail, marketing, finance or communication. Through this process, it is possible to determine the different relationships between the varying factors. The varying factors include staffing, product positioning, pricing, social demographics, and market competition.

A data-mining program can be used. It is important note that the data mining applications vary in types. Some of the types include machine learning, statistical, and neural networks. The program is interested in any of the following four types of relationships: clusters (in this case the data is grouped in relation to the consumer preferences or logical relationships), classes (in this the data is stored and finds its use in the location of data in the per-determined groups), sequential patterns (in this case the data is used to estimate the behavioral patterns and patterns), and associations (data is used to identify associations).

In knowledge discovery, there are different levels of data analysis and they include genetic algorithms, artificial neural networks, nearest neighbor method, data visualization, decision trees, and rule induction. The level of analysis used depends on the data that is visualized and the output needed.

Nowadays, data extraction programs are readily available in different sizes from PC platforms, mainframe, and client/server. In the enterprise-wide uses, size ranges from the 10 GB to more than 11 TB. It is important to note that two crucial technological drivers are needed and are query complexity and, database size. When more data is needed to be processed and maintained, then a more powerful system is needed that can handle complex and greater queries.

With the emergence of professional data mining companies, the costs associated with process such as web data extraction, web scraping, web crawling and web data mining have greatly being made affordable.



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Data Entry Services For Organization - Outsource Data Entry Services

It is unimportant that you have a small business or big organization to serve large audience. Information is an important aspect for any size or kind of company. In business, profitability is main focus. Currently, there is constant fluctuation in business world. Every business has to be dynamic with high tempo.

In such a high pressured business environment, quick accessibility of accurate and detailed information is essential. If you know more about your customer, industry, trend and other factor which affect your business, you can quickly compare your business and increase the value. To manage such requirements, data entry services are the best option. Typing services not only control all information but also control information management effectively.

For any business that wants to extract data from any source, data entry services are necessity. Different types of businesses require different services. Some organizations choose offline data typing services while other gives significance to online data typing services. The main purpose of data typing services are same - organizing data properly for future use. Data typing services also include image entry, book entry, card entry, hand-written entry, legal document entry, insurance claim entry and other.

The general idea about data entry services are entering data into business database. But it's not just; it also includes data collection, extraction and processing. Such typing task is very time consuming. These tasks can be performed quickly and efficiently by data typing expert. So, such professionals are in high demand.

Some years ago, it was assumed that only in-house personnel could really understand the company's products or services. But today, various business process outsourcing companies are having typing experts who are quite knowledgeable in almost every field of business. They can easily manage your requirements and deliver the best result.

Typing service companies can manage your information with higher efficiency and produce quicker result. In current scenario, business organizations do not waver to outsource the typing task. Now, most of the companies are outsourcing their typing task and getting benefit of higher productivity and profitability.

Business organizations have understood the importance of managing information and necessity of data entry services.



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RFM - A Precursor to Data Mining

RFM was initially utilized by marketers in the B-2-C space - specifically in industries like Cataloging, Insurance, Retail Banking, Telecommunications and others. There are a number of scoring approaches that can be used with RFM. We'll take a look at three:

RFM - Basic Ranking
RFM - Within Parent Cell Ranking
RFM - Weighted Cell Ranking

Each approach has experienced proponents that argue one over the other. The point is to start somewhere and experiment to find the one that works best for your company and your customer base. Let's look at a few examples.

RFM - Basic Ranking

This approach involves scoring customers based on each RFM factor separately. It begins with sorting your customers based on Recency, i.e., the number of days or months since their last purchase. Once sorted in ascending order (most recent purchasers at the top), the customers are then split into quintiles, or five equal groups. The customers in the top quintile represent the 20% of your customers that most recently purchased from you.

This process is then undertaken for Frequency and Monetary as well. Each customer is in one of the five cells for R, F, and M

Experience tells us that the best prospects for an upcoming campaign are those customers that are in Quintile 5 for each factor - those customers that have purchased most recently, most frequently and have spent the most money. In fact, a common approach to creating an aggregated score is to concatenate the individual RFM scores together resulting in 125 cells (5x5x5).

A customer's score can range from 555 being the highest, to 111 being the lowest.

RFM - Within Parent Cell Ranking

This approach is advocated by Arthur Middleton Hughes - one of the biggest proponents of RFM analysis. It begins like the one above, i.e., all customer are initially grouped into 5 cells based on Recency. The next step takes customers in a given Recency cell - say cell number 5, and then ranks those customers based on Frequency. Then customers in the 55 (RF) cell are ranked by monetary value.

RFM - Weighted Ranking

Weightings used by RFM practitioners vary. For example some advocate adding the RFM score together - thus giving equal weight to each factor. Consequently, scores can range from 15 (5+5+5) to 3 (1+1+1). Another weighting arrangement often used is, 3xR + 2xF + 1xM. In this case, scores can range from 30 to 3.

So which to use? In reality, there are many other permutations of approaches that are being used today. Best-practice marketing analytics requires a fine mix of mathematical and statistical science, creativity and experimentation. Bottom line, test multiple scoring methods to see which works best for your unique customer base.

Establishing a Score Threshold

After a test or production campaign, you will find that some of the cells were profitable while some were not. Let's turn to a case study to see how you can establish a threshold that will help maximize your profitability. This study comes from Professor Charlotte Mason of the Kenan-Flagler Business School and utilizes a real-life marketing study performed by The BookBinders Book Club (Source:Recency, Frequency and Monetary (RFM) Analysis, Professor Charlotte Mason, Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina, 2003).

BookBinders is a specialty book seller that utilizes multiple marketing channels. BookBinders traditionally did mass marketing and wanted to test the power of RFM. To do so, they initially did a random mailing to 50,000 customers. The customers were mailed an offer to purchase The Art History of Florence. Response data was captured and a "post-RFM" analysis was completed. This "post analysis" was done by freezing the files of the 50,000 test customers prior to the actual test offer. Thus, the impact of this test campaign did not effect the analysis by coding many (the actual buyers) of the 50,000 test subjects as the most recent purchasers. The results firmly support the use of RFM as a highly effective segmentation approach.

Purchased the book = yes; months since last purchase = 8.61; total # purchases = 5.22; dollars spent = 234.30
Purchased the book = no; Months since last purchase = 12.73; total # purchases = 3.76; dollars spent = 205.74

Customers that purchased the book were more recent purchasers, more frequent purchasers and had spent the most with BookBinders.

The response rate for the top decile (18%) was twice the response rate associated with the 5th decile (9%).

Results from this test were then used by BookBinders to identify which of their remaining customers should receive the same mailing. BookBinders used a breakeven response rate calculation to determine the appropriate RFM cells to mail.

The following cost information was used as input:

Cost per Mail-piece $0.50

Selling Price $18.00

BookBinders Book Cost $9.00

Shipping Costs $3.00

Breakeven is achieved when the cost of the mailing is equal to the net profit from a sale. In this case:

Breakeven = (cost to mail the offer/net profit from a single sale)

= $0.50/($18-9-3)

= ($0.50/6)

= 8.3% = Breakeven Response rate

So, according to the test offer, profit can be obtained by mailing to cells that exhibited a response rate of greater than 8.3%

RFM dramatically improved profitability by capturing 71% of buyers (3,214/4,522) while mailing only 46% of their customers (22,731/50,000). And the return on marketing expenditures using RFM was more than eight times (69.7/8.5) that of a mass mailing.

Number of Cells and Cell Size Considerations

As previously mentioned, RFM was initially utilized by companies that operated in the B-to-C marketplace and generally possessed a very large number of customers. The idea of generating 125 cells using quintiles for R, F and M has been a very good practice as an initial modeling effort. But what if you are a B-to-B marketer with relatively fewer customers? Or, what if you are a B-to-C marketer with an extremely large file with millions of customers? The answer is to use the same approach that is used in data mining -- be flexible and experiment.

Establishing a minimum test cell size is a good place to start. Arthur Hughes recommends the following formula:

Test Cell Size = 4 / Breakeven Response Rate.

The Breakeven Response Rate was addressed above in the BookBinders case study. The number "4" is a number that Hughes has found works successfully based on many studies he has performed. BookBinders Breakeven Response Rate was 8.3%. Using the above formula, you would need a minimum of 48 customers in each cell (4/0.083). BookBinders actually had 400 customers per cell, so they had more than adequate comfort in the significance of their test. In reality, BookBinders could have created as many as 1,041 cells if they were comfortable using the minimum of 48 per cell. As an example, they could have used deciles as opposed to quintiles and established 1,000 cells (10 x 10 x 10). The more cells the finer the analysis, but of course the law of diminishing returns will arise.

Other weighting considerations can be used for small files. If your Breakeven Response Rate is 3%, your minimum cell size would be 133 customers (4/0.03). Therefore, if you have 12,000 customers you could have about 90 cells (12,000/133). As such, a 5 x 5 x 4 (100 cells) or a 5 x 4 x 4 (80 cells) approach may be appropriate.

Conclusions

RFM, BI and data mining are all part of an evolutionary path that is common to many marketing organizations. While RFM has been practiced for over 40 years, it still holds great value for many organizations. Its merits include:

- Simplicity - easy to understand and implement

- Relatively low cost

- Proven ROI

- The demand on data requirements are relatively low in terms of variables required and the number of records

- Once utilized, it sets up a broader foundation (from an infrastructure and business case perspective) to undertake more sophisticated data mining efforts

RFM's challenges include:

- Contact fatigue can be a problem for the higher scoring customers. A high level cross-campaign communication strategy can help prevent this.

- Your lowest scoring customers may never hear from you. Again, a cross-campaign communications plan should ensure that all of your customers are communicated with periodically to ensure low scoring customers are given the opportunity to meet their potential. Also, data mining and the prediction of customer lifetime value can help address this shortcoming.

- RFM includes only three variables. Data mining typically finds RFM-based variables to be quite important in response models. But there are additional variables that data mining typically use (e.g., detailed transaction, demographic and firmographic) that help produce improved results. Moreover, data mining techniques can also increase response rates via the development of richer segment/cell profiles that can be used to vary offer content and incentives.

As stated before, successful marketing efforts require analytics and experimentation. RFM has proven itself as an effective approach to predicting response and improving profitability. It can be an important stage in your company's evolution in marketing analytics.




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How Web Data Extraction Services Will Save Your Time and Money by Automatic Data Collection

Data scrape is the process of extracting data from web by using software program from proven website only. Extracted data any one can use for any purposes as per the desires in various industries as the web having every important data of the world. We provide best of the web data extracting software. We have the expertise and one of kind knowledge in web data extraction, image scrapping, screen scrapping, email extract services, data mining, web grabbing.

Who can use Data Scraping Services?

Data scraping and extraction services can be used by any organization, company, or any firm who would like to have a data from particular industry, data of targeted customer, particular company, or anything which is available on net like data of email id, website name, search term or anything which is available on web. Most of time a marketing company like to use data scraping and data extraction services to do marketing for a particular product in certain industry and to reach the targeted customer for example if X company like to contact a restaurant of California city, so our software can extract the data of restaurant of California city and a marketing company can use this data to market their restaurant kind of product. MLM and Network marketing company also use data extraction and data scrapping services to to find a new customer by extracting data of certain prospective customer and can contact customer by telephone, sending a postcard, email marketing, and this way they build their huge network and build large group for their own product and company.

We helped many companies to find particular data as per their need for example.

Web Data Extraction

Web pages are built using text-based mark-up languages (HTML and XHTML), and frequently contain a wealth of useful data in text form. However, most web pages are designed for human end-users and not for ease of automated use. Because of this, tool kits that scrape web content were created. A web scraper is an API to extract data from a web site. We help you to create a kind of API which helps you to scrape data as per your need. We provide quality and affordable web Data Extraction application

Data Collection

Normally, data transfer between programs is accomplished using info structures suited for automated processing by computers, not people. Such interchange formats and protocols are typically rigidly structured, well-documented, easily parsed, and keep ambiguity to a minimum. Very often, these transmissions are not human-readable at all. That's why the key element that distinguishes data scraping from regular parsing is that the output being scraped was intended for display to an end-user.

Email Extractor

A tool which helps you to extract the email ids from any reliable sources automatically that is called a email extractor. It basically services the function of collecting business contacts from various web pages, HTML files, text files or any other format without duplicates email ids.

Screen scrapping

Screen scraping referred to the practice of reading text information from a computer display terminal's screen and collecting visual data from a source, instead of parsing data as in web scraping.

Data Mining Services

Data Mining Services is the process of extracting patterns from information. Datamining is becoming an increasingly important tool to transform the data into information. Any format including MS excels, CSV, HTML and many such formats according to your requirements.

Web spider

A Web spider is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner or in an orderly fashion. Many sites, in particular search engines, use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data.

Web Grabber

Web grabber is just a other name of the data scraping or data extraction.

Web Bot

Web Bot is software program that is claimed to be able to predict future events by tracking keywords entered on the Internet. Web bot software is the best program to pull out articles, blog, relevant website content and many such website related data We have worked with many clients for data extracting, data scrapping and data mining they are really happy with our services we provide very quality services and make your work data work very easy and automatic.




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Web Data Extraction Services and Data Collection Form Website Pages

For any business market research and surveys plays crucial role in strategic decision making. Web scrapping and data extraction techniques help you find relevant information and data for your business or personal use. Most of the time professionals manually copy-paste data from web pages or download a whole website resulting in waste of time and efforts.

Instead, consider using web scraping techniques that crawls through thousands of website pages to extract specific information and simultaneously save this information into a database, CSV file, XML file or any other custom format for future reference.

Examples of web data extraction process include:
• Spider a government portal, extracting names of citizens for a survey
• Crawl competitor websites for product pricing and feature data
• Use web scraping to download images from a stock photography site for website design

Automated Data Collection
Web scraping also allows you to monitor website data changes over stipulated period and collect these data on a scheduled basis automatically. Automated data collection helps you discover market trends, determine user behavior and predict how data will change in near future.

Examples of automated data collection include:
• Monitor price information for select stocks on hourly basis
• Collect mortgage rates from various financial firms on daily basis
• Check whether reports on constant basis as and when required

Using web data extraction services you can mine any data related to your business objective, download them into a spreadsheet so that they can be analyzed and compared with ease.

In this way you get accurate and quicker results saving hundreds of man-hours and money!

With web data extraction services you can easily fetch product pricing information, sales leads, mailing database, competitors data, profile data and many more on a consistent basis.




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