Database Reference
In-Depth Information
profiles and personal profiles, respectively.
21
Another common term is
risk
profiles
, indicating the some kind of risk of an individual or group of people (such
as the risk of getting a heart-attack, of not paying your mortgage or of being a
terrorist).
A personal profile is a property or a collection of properties of a particular
individual. A
property
, or a
characteristic
, is the same as an
attribute
, a term more
used often in computer sciences. An example of a personal profile is the personal
profile of Mr John Doe (44), who is married, has two children, earns 25,000 Euro
a year, and has two credit cards and no criminal record. He was hospitalized only
twice in his life, once for appendicitis and last year because of lung cancer.
A group profile is a property or a collection of properties of a particular group
of people.
22
Group profiles may contain information that is already known; for
instance, people who smoke live, on average, a few years less than people who do
not. But group profiles may also show new facts; for instance, people living in zip
code area 8391 may have a (significantly) larger than average chance of having
asthma. Group profiles do not have to describe a causal relation. For instance,
people driving red cars may have (significantly) more chances of getting colon
cancer than people driving blue cars. Note that group profiles differ from
individuals with regard to the fact that the properties in the profile may be valid
for the group and for individuals as members of that group, though not for those
individuals as such. If this is the case, this is referred to as
non-distributivity
or
non-distributive properties.
23
On the other hand, when properties are valid for each
individual member of a group as an individual, this is referred to as
distributivity
or distributive properties.
Several data mining methods are particularly suitable for profiling. For
instance, classification and clustering may be used to identify groups.
24
Regression
is more useful for making predictions about a known individual or group. More on
these and other techniques can be found in Chapter 2.
1.2.4 Why We Need These Tools
The use of data mining and profiling is still on the increase, mainly because they
are usually very efficient and effective tools to deal with the (also) ever increasing
amounts of data that we collect and process in our information society. According
to Moore's Law, the number of transistors on an integrated circuit (a 'chip' or
'microchip') for minimum component costs doubles every 24 months.
25
This more
or less implies that storage capacity doubles every two years (or that data storage
costs are reduced by fifty percent every two years). This empirical observation by
Gordon Moore was made in 1965; by now, this doubling speed is approximately
18 months. From this perspective there is hardly any need to limit the amounts of
21
See Bygrave, L.A. (2002), p. 303, and Clarke, R. (1997).
Seewww.anu.edu.au/people/roger.clarke/dv/custproffin.html.
22
Note that when the group size is 1, a group profile boils down to a personal profile.
23
Vedder, A.H. (1999).
24
SPSS Inc. (1999), p. 131.
25
Schaller, R.R. (1997).
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