Practical Problem Solving - Java Data Mining: Strategy, Standard, and Practice - page 293

extract is provided as a logical view or a physical table in
the operational marketing database (OMDB).
• The campaign manager uses the application to sample
customers from this extract for the starter campaign. The
first version of the application permits selection of a simple
random sample; however, subsequent versions will imple-
ment more sophisticated sampling strategies. Because the
sampling technique may vary, sampling is not directly
performed by the IT department. The sample is provided as
a table in the OMDB that contains columns: customer name,
customer address, and response, which will be filled later
by values indicating Responded or Did-not-respond . In this
example, HEW's customers are offered a single product, so
the value Responded means that the customer purchased the
proposed product. More complex situations can be met
when mailing catalogs in which consumers choose possibly
several products.
• HEW IT sends this extract to TCA as a text file.
• Some weeks later, HEW IT loads the customer prospect
responses obtained by TCA in the OMDB.
• The campaign manager uses the application to produce a
build dataset, to build classification models, and to forecast
the expected profit of a large-scale campaign associated
with a specific cost structure. The cost structure is
composed of fixed costs, the unitary cost per mail, and the
profit generated when the customer buys the product.
Using this cost structure, the application optimizes the
number of mails sent to maximize expected profit. It then
reports this profit for each model built.
• The campaign manager uses the application to select the
most effective model and uses this model to generate the
prospective customers list for the large-scale mailing. This
list will be stored in an OMDB table. The application reports
the number of actual mails to be sent, the expected profit,
and the expected number of respondents.
• HEW IT sends this prospective customers list to TCA as
a file.
• Some weeks later, HEW IT loads the “response” values
associated with the customers in the OMDB table.