Home > Articles > Business & Management

This chapter is from the book

A Common Analytical Methodology

We struggled for some time and went through multiple iterations before we settled on a common analytical methodology that spans domains, business objectives, and information sources. Our method has three major phases: Explore, Understand, and Analyze. Each of these phases leverages different capabilities that build on each other. However, it is not always necessary to use every phase or capability. For very large information collections, we have developed the capabilities in Explore, and we will discuss this in Chapter 5, "Mining to Improve Innovation." Most of this book will concentrate on the Understand and Analyze phases, which are the unique differentiators and the key to unlocking the business value of unstructured information in Mining the Talk. In this section, we introduce each of these concepts and describe what they entail.

Explore

Many times we are dealing with very large repositories of information. Depending on our information source and our business objective, not all of the information will be relevant. For example, if you are interested in analyzing the Web to understand issues around a specific brand, you only need the portion of the Web that pertains to that brand. If you are analyzing patents related to a technology area, you only need the patents that are relevant to that area. We use a combination of techniques to locate the relevant set of information from a larger set. With structured information, we can use various queries; for unstructured information, we can use search, and we can combine them in different ways using various set operations. We call this process Explore.

Queries

We use query as the term to describe how we use structured fields in a database to select the subset of information that is of interest. For example, we can select customers based upon their location, the product they have purchased, or the time frame that we wish to investigate. We can select patents based upon the assignee, the inventor, or the classification code. These are all typically structured fields that are stored in a database. These types of queries are quite simple to perform using the standard SQL query language to find the sub-collections of interest. This technique is very powerful and effective, given you have the appropriate attributes in the database and know which of their values will select the subset that is relevant to address the issue being analyzed.

Search

Search is the process of finding those documents that contain specific words or phrases in their unstructured text. We use search as the means to find collections of documents that have concepts of interest within them, rather than to find individual documents. Although it is a valuable tool, search is not the solution to all problems. The use of language does not always lend itself to easily disambiguate concepts. Some words have more than one meaning, known as homonyms. For example, using "shell" as a query will likely return information on sea shells, Shell Oil, Unix shell, egg shells, and many others. Disambiguation is one problem, but coverage is another. Some meanings can be described with more than one word, known as synonyms. For example, we have found that valium has more than 150 unique names—have fun typing that query.

Set Operations

Because in many cases no single query or search is sufficient to get to the optimally desired collection for deeper analysis, we have found it necessary to be able to perform set operation on collections. The most commonly used operations are join and intersect. Joins are useful in combining multiple searches for synonyms. Intersection is useful when you are looking for the subset that has two attributes that could be from either the structured or unstructured fields. In some cases, when the result of a combination of queries and searches is still too large to effectively analyze in a reasonable time, sampling techniques may be used to select a statistically valid subset.

Recursion and Expansion

Results of queries and searches can be used as input to subsequent Explore operations. This allows us to refine the subject of our mining study incrementally as we learn more about the data. Also, we can use query expansion to take the results of a query done on a subset of the data and apply it to the entire data collection.

Understand

The result of the Explore phase is a collection of information that covers the topic of interest. The Understand phase is about discovering what the information contains. We have developed a unique method of creating structure from unstructured information through the process of taxonomy generation and refinement. We use a combination of practical steps, statistical techniques, algorithms, and a methodology for editing taxonomies that allows for the flexible capture of domain expertise and business objectives. We call this process Understand. The Understand process works in two directions: the analyst understands the underlying structure inherent in the unstructured information, and the models captured as a result of the analyst's edits represent an understanding of domain knowledge and business objectives.

Statistics are fundamental to our Understand process. We are all familiar with the idea of summarizing numerical data with statistical techniques. For example, a grade point average is a way to summarize your overall academic performance. It doesn't tell you everything, but most people have agreed that it is a pretty good indicator. What about something more complex, like a sporting event? Pick your favorite sport—whether it is baseball, basketball, tennis, or football—and there are usually various ways to summarize the game or match that allow you to understand the essence of what transpired. Such summaries are no substitute for watching the game, but they can convey a lot of information about the game in a very small space.

Partitioning

If you have a large body of text, there is probably one or more natural ways to partition it into smaller sections. A book naturally falls into chapters, and each chapter into paragraphs, and each paragraph into sentences, just as a baseball game has innings and innings have outs. Breaking a large document into smaller entities makes it much easier to summarize the message of the text as a whole, because it makes statistics possible. If we try to summarize a baseball game without breaking it down by innings and outs, we are left with only the final score. But if we can break down the game into innings or at-bats and measure what happened during each of these smaller units (e.g., hits, walks, outs), then we can create meaningful statistics such as Earned Run Average or On Base Percentage.

There may be many suitable ways to do partitioning, each with its own advantage. However, the best methods for partitioning are those that produce a section that talks about only one concept with respect to the questions we want answered. The level of granularity should roughly match that of the desired business result. The analogy in baseball is that we measure innings for pitchers and at-bats for batters. The different levels of granularity make sense for different kinds of outcomes that need to be measured.

Similarly, if we want to understand the issues for which customers are calling into a call center, then individual problem records, which may span multiple calls, are the right partitioning. On the other hand, if we wish to understand better what affects customer satisfaction, we may decide to analyze each individual call record. A customer might be both satisfied and dissatisfied during the course of resolving an issue, and we want to isolate the interactions in order to analyze the underlying causes.

Feature Selection

Once the partitioning granularity is properly adjusted, we need to decide what events we are going to measure and what statistics we will keep. In a baseball box score, we don't measure everything about the game. For example, we don't know the average number of swings each batter took, or the number of pitches each pitcher threw. We could measure these things if they were important to us, but that level of detail is not interesting to the average baseball fan. Similarly in statistical analysis of text, we could measure the average number of times each letter of the alphabet occurs. We could measure the average word length, or the number of words in sentences. In fact, such statistics are used as a means for roughly measuring how "readable" a section of text will be for readers of various grade levels.2 However, these kinds of statistics are not helpful to answer typical business questions, such as "What are my customers most unhappy about?"

So what are the right things to measure about each text example? The answer is, it all depends. It depends on what we want to learn and what kind of text data we are dealing with. Word occurrence is a good place to start for most types of problems, especially those where you don't have much specific domain knowledge to draw upon and where the language of the documents is fairly general. When the text is more technically dense or focused on a very specialized area, then it may make sense to also measure sequences of words, also known as phrases, to get a more precise kind of statistic.

We use word and phrase occurrence as the features of a document. However, we don't use every word and phrase, because there can be a very large number of them and they are not all meaningful or useful. We use a combination of techniques to reduce the feature space to a more manageable size. We eliminate non-content–bearing words, called stopwords, such as "and" and "the." We also remove repetitive or structural phrases (we call them stock phrases). If every document contains "Copyright IBM" or "IBM Confidential," then it can safely be removed. We also combine features using a synonym list. This can be done manually where deemed appropriate or automatically through a technique called stemming. Stemming allows "jump," "jumping," and "jumped" to be treated as one. There are also various domain-specific synonym lists that can be used where stemming will fall short. Finally, we remove features that occur infrequently in the document collection because these tend to have little value in creating meaningful categories. Once we have reduced the features to a manageable size, we can use this to create summary statistics for each document. We call the collection of all such statistics for every document in a collection the vector space model.

Clustering

We use clustering to quickly and easily seed the process of taxonomy generation. Clustering is an algorithmic attempt to automatically group documents into thematic categories. These thematic categories, which together constitute a taxonomy, give an overview of what information the document collection contains. There are many different clustering algorithms that could be used, and our approach could support them all. However, we have relied heavily on variations of the k-means algorithm, because it is fast and does a reasonable job. We have also developed our own algorithm, which we call intuitive clustering, that we also employ.

Taxonomy Editing

Clustering is a wonderful tool, but we rarely find it to be sufficient. No matter how good the algorithmic approach to clustering becomes, it cannot embed the nuance of business objectives and the variations of language from different information sources within an algorithm. This is the critical missing element that our method incorporates. We have developed a unique set of capabilities that allow for an analyst or domain expert to quickly assess the strengths and weaknesses of a taxonomy and easily make the changes necessary to align the taxonomy with business objectives.

Analyst knowledge about the purpose of the taxonomy trumps every other consideration. Thus, a category may be created by an analyst for reasons that have nothing to do with text features. An example would be a category of "recent" documents—those created most recently out of all the documents in the corpus. Depending on the business analysis goals, such a category may be very important in helping to understand emerging trends and issues.

Ideally, the name of a category should describe exactly what makes the category unique. An analyst may decide to change a system-generated name to one that is better aligned with the analyst's view of what the category contains. This category renaming process thus becomes an important way that domain expertise is captured.

In addition to the name, a category can also be described by choosing examples that best summarize the overall content. We describe these as "Typical Examples" because they are selected by virtue of having all or most of the features that typify the documents in the category as a whole. Using the vector space model, it is possible to automatically compare examples and select those that have the most typical content. By reading and understanding typical examples, it is possible for the analyst to make sense of a large collection of documents in a relatively short period of time.

It is also important to measure the variation within a category of documents. If there is a statistically large variation among the documents within a category, this may indicate that the category needs to be split up, or subcategorized. We call the metric that measures within category variation cohesion. Additionally, it is important to measure the similarity between categories. We call this distinctness. Categories with low distinctness scores indicate a potential overlap with another category. This overlap may indicate the need to merge two or more categories together.

The categories created using clustering and summarized with various statistics can also be edited based on this understanding. This is where analysts adds their domain knowledge and awareness of the business problem to be solved to the results—creating categories that are more meaningful.

There are many kinds of editing that are typically employed, at all levels of the text categorization. Categories can be merged or deleted. They can be created wholesale from documents matching individual words, phrases, or features. Categories can be edited—splitting off subsets of a category to create new categories. Documents can be selectively removed from one category and placed in another.

The taxonomy editing process can be thought of as the human expert training the computer to understand concepts that are important to the business. There may be many different types of categorizations that can be created on the same set of data, each representing a different important aspect of the information to the enterprise.

Visualizations

The visual cortex occupies about one third of the surface of the cerebral cortex in humans. It would be a shame to waste all of that immense processing power during the Understand process. We employ visualizations of taxonomies to create pictures of the information that the human brain can process in order to locate areas of special interest that contain patterns or relationships. There are many types of visualizations that can be used to show relationships in structured and unstructured information. Scatter plots, trees, bar graphs, and pie charts can all help in the process of understanding the information, and in modifying taxonomies to reflect business objectives.

The vector space model of feature occurrence in documents is the primary data source for automatically calculating visual representations of text. Using this representation, a document becomes not just words, but a position or point in high-dimensional space. Given this representation, a computer can "draw" a set of documents and allow a human analyst to explore the text space in much the same way an astronomer explores the galaxy of stars and planets.

Analyze

At the end of the Understand phase, we have one or more taxonomies that represent characteristics of the unstructured information, along with a feature set that describes the individual documents that make up each taxonomy. But a taxonomy by itself rarely achieves the business objectives of mining unstructured information. The final step is to take combinations of structured and unstructured information and look for trends, patterns, and relationships inherent in the data and use that to make better business decisions. We call this process Analyze.

Trending

Timing is everything in comedy, in life, and in business. Knowing how categories occurred in the data stream over time will often reveal something interesting about why that category occurs in the first place. Trend analysis is also useful for detecting spikes in categories as well as in predicting how categories will evolve in the future. Trending can be interesting from a historical perspective, but it is usually most valuable when used to detect emerging events. If you can detect a problem in your business before it costs you a lot of money, that goes straight to the bottom line. If you can spot a trend before your competition, you have a leg up.

Correlations

Taxonomies capture the concepts embedded in unstructured information. Co-occurrence analysis reveals hidden relationships between these concepts and other attributes or between categories of different taxonomies. For example, we can look for a relationship between technology areas and companies to see where our competition is investing. Or we can find a correlation between a specific factory and a certain kind of product defect.

A correlation is based on the simple idea that two different phenomenon have occurred together more than expected. For example, if 100 customers who talked to a specific call center representative ended up dissatisfied with their overall customer experience, then depending on the total percentage of unsatisfied callers and the total percentage of calls that particular representative took, we could calculate whether there was a correlation between dissatisfaction and talking to this representative. Keep in mind that, even if there is such a correlation, it doesn't mean that this representative is actually responsible for the poor customer satisfaction. It could be that this person only works during weekends and that people who call on the weekends are generally more dissatisfied. This example serves to show that correlations are not causes. They are simply indicators of potential explanations that should be explored further. Think of them as "leading indicators" of business insights.

Classification

One you have a taxonomy that models an important aspect of the information, it is important to be able to apply this classification scheme to new unstructured data. Many classification algorithms exist, and we have incorporated a large variety of them into our approach, allowing us to select the best algorithm for a given taxonomy and information collection. The specifics of how we do text classification is a more technical subject that is beyond the scope of this book. However, the general approach is to pick the algorithm that most accurately represents each category, based on a random sampling of the documents in that category being used to test the accuracy of each modeling approach.

InformIT Promotional Mailings & Special Offers

I would like to receive exclusive offers and hear about products from InformIT and its family of brands. I can unsubscribe at any time.

Overview


Pearson Education, Inc., 221 River Street, Hoboken, New Jersey 07030, (Pearson) presents this site to provide information about products and services that can be purchased through this site.

This privacy notice provides an overview of our commitment to privacy and describes how we collect, protect, use and share personal information collected through this site. Please note that other Pearson websites and online products and services have their own separate privacy policies.

Collection and Use of Information


To conduct business and deliver products and services, Pearson collects and uses personal information in several ways in connection with this site, including:

Questions and Inquiries

For inquiries and questions, we collect the inquiry or question, together with name, contact details (email address, phone number and mailing address) and any other additional information voluntarily submitted to us through a Contact Us form or an email. We use this information to address the inquiry and respond to the question.

Online Store

For orders and purchases placed through our online store on this site, we collect order details, name, institution name and address (if applicable), email address, phone number, shipping and billing addresses, credit/debit card information, shipping options and any instructions. We use this information to complete transactions, fulfill orders, communicate with individuals placing orders or visiting the online store, and for related purposes.

Surveys

Pearson may offer opportunities to provide feedback or participate in surveys, including surveys evaluating Pearson products, services or sites. Participation is voluntary. Pearson collects information requested in the survey questions and uses the information to evaluate, support, maintain and improve products, services or sites, develop new products and services, conduct educational research and for other purposes specified in the survey.

Contests and Drawings

Occasionally, we may sponsor a contest or drawing. Participation is optional. Pearson collects name, contact information and other information specified on the entry form for the contest or drawing to conduct the contest or drawing. Pearson may collect additional personal information from the winners of a contest or drawing in order to award the prize and for tax reporting purposes, as required by law.

Newsletters

If you have elected to receive email newsletters or promotional mailings and special offers but want to unsubscribe, simply email information@informit.com.

Service Announcements

On rare occasions it is necessary to send out a strictly service related announcement. For instance, if our service is temporarily suspended for maintenance we might send users an email. Generally, users may not opt-out of these communications, though they can deactivate their account information. However, these communications are not promotional in nature.

Customer Service

We communicate with users on a regular basis to provide requested services and in regard to issues relating to their account we reply via email or phone in accordance with the users' wishes when a user submits their information through our Contact Us form.

Other Collection and Use of Information


Application and System Logs

Pearson automatically collects log data to help ensure the delivery, availability and security of this site. Log data may include technical information about how a user or visitor connected to this site, such as browser type, type of computer/device, operating system, internet service provider and IP address. We use this information for support purposes and to monitor the health of the site, identify problems, improve service, detect unauthorized access and fraudulent activity, prevent and respond to security incidents and appropriately scale computing resources.

Web Analytics

Pearson may use third party web trend analytical services, including Google Analytics, to collect visitor information, such as IP addresses, browser types, referring pages, pages visited and time spent on a particular site. While these analytical services collect and report information on an anonymous basis, they may use cookies to gather web trend information. The information gathered may enable Pearson (but not the third party web trend services) to link information with application and system log data. Pearson uses this information for system administration and to identify problems, improve service, detect unauthorized access and fraudulent activity, prevent and respond to security incidents, appropriately scale computing resources and otherwise support and deliver this site and its services.

Cookies and Related Technologies

This site uses cookies and similar technologies to personalize content, measure traffic patterns, control security, track use and access of information on this site, and provide interest-based messages and advertising. Users can manage and block the use of cookies through their browser. Disabling or blocking certain cookies may limit the functionality of this site.

Do Not Track

This site currently does not respond to Do Not Track signals.

Security


Pearson uses appropriate physical, administrative and technical security measures to protect personal information from unauthorized access, use and disclosure.

Children


This site is not directed to children under the age of 13.

Marketing


Pearson may send or direct marketing communications to users, provided that

  • Pearson will not use personal information collected or processed as a K-12 school service provider for the purpose of directed or targeted advertising.
  • Such marketing is consistent with applicable law and Pearson's legal obligations.
  • Pearson will not knowingly direct or send marketing communications to an individual who has expressed a preference not to receive marketing.
  • Where required by applicable law, express or implied consent to marketing exists and has not been withdrawn.

Pearson may provide personal information to a third party service provider on a restricted basis to provide marketing solely on behalf of Pearson or an affiliate or customer for whom Pearson is a service provider. Marketing preferences may be changed at any time.

Correcting/Updating Personal Information


If a user's personally identifiable information changes (such as your postal address or email address), we provide a way to correct or update that user's personal data provided to us. This can be done on the Account page. If a user no longer desires our service and desires to delete his or her account, please contact us at customer-service@informit.com and we will process the deletion of a user's account.

Choice/Opt-out


Users can always make an informed choice as to whether they should proceed with certain services offered by InformIT. If you choose to remove yourself from our mailing list(s) simply visit the following page and uncheck any communication you no longer want to receive: www.informit.com/u.aspx.

Sale of Personal Information


Pearson does not rent or sell personal information in exchange for any payment of money.

While Pearson does not sell personal information, as defined in Nevada law, Nevada residents may email a request for no sale of their personal information to NevadaDesignatedRequest@pearson.com.

Supplemental Privacy Statement for California Residents


California residents should read our Supplemental privacy statement for California residents in conjunction with this Privacy Notice. The Supplemental privacy statement for California residents explains Pearson's commitment to comply with California law and applies to personal information of California residents collected in connection with this site and the Services.

Sharing and Disclosure


Pearson may disclose personal information, as follows:

  • As required by law.
  • With the consent of the individual (or their parent, if the individual is a minor)
  • In response to a subpoena, court order or legal process, to the extent permitted or required by law
  • To protect the security and safety of individuals, data, assets and systems, consistent with applicable law
  • In connection the sale, joint venture or other transfer of some or all of its company or assets, subject to the provisions of this Privacy Notice
  • To investigate or address actual or suspected fraud or other illegal activities
  • To exercise its legal rights, including enforcement of the Terms of Use for this site or another contract
  • To affiliated Pearson companies and other companies and organizations who perform work for Pearson and are obligated to protect the privacy of personal information consistent with this Privacy Notice
  • To a school, organization, company or government agency, where Pearson collects or processes the personal information in a school setting or on behalf of such organization, company or government agency.

Links


This web site contains links to other sites. Please be aware that we are not responsible for the privacy practices of such other sites. We encourage our users to be aware when they leave our site and to read the privacy statements of each and every web site that collects Personal Information. This privacy statement applies solely to information collected by this web site.

Requests and Contact


Please contact us about this Privacy Notice or if you have any requests or questions relating to the privacy of your personal information.

Changes to this Privacy Notice


We may revise this Privacy Notice through an updated posting. We will identify the effective date of the revision in the posting. Often, updates are made to provide greater clarity or to comply with changes in regulatory requirements. If the updates involve material changes to the collection, protection, use or disclosure of Personal Information, Pearson will provide notice of the change through a conspicuous notice on this site or other appropriate way. Continued use of the site after the effective date of a posted revision evidences acceptance. Please contact us if you have questions or concerns about the Privacy Notice or any objection to any revisions.

Last Update: November 17, 2020