Rosella       Machine Intelligence & Data Mining

Census Survey Data Analysis

Census and survey data analysis is vital part of modern day government and business activities. Normally, census is taken from a population, whereas survey is conducted on a sub-population. One common feature is that they often consist of many variables. Quantitative marketing research and socio-economic research survey data typically consist of dozens of questionnaires containing numerous demographic, geographic, and psychographic information.

Combinational Factor Analysis and Combinatorial Blowout!

It is common to see census and survey data consisting of many variables. Generally, more survey questions means more information to analyze. In conventional methods, analysts use visualization and statistical reporting tools. These tools can work on only a few variables at a time. When applied to data with many variables, the numbers of cases to be examined grow combinatorially to the numbers of variables. Therefore, thorough systematic accurate analysis of such data is all but impossible. General practice is to examine only variable combinations what experts think promising. However, intuition can omit important trends and patterns emerging. Better ways are needed for timely thorough systematic analysis! Hotspot analysis described in the following section can overcome this limitation.

Hotspot Profiling Analysis

Hotspot Analysis drills-down data systematically and detects important relationships, co-factors, interactions, dependencies and associations amongst many variables and values accurately using Artificial Intelligence techniques, and generate profiles of most interesting segments. This provides analysts accurate mapping of most interesting segments which is hotspots. It is noted that Hotspot Analysis is a new generation tool that will revolutionize conventional statistical analytic processes.

The following figure shows an example of hotspot analysis output. Top-left is hotspot drill-down tree. Top-right shows detailed statistics of hotspots selected. Bottom left and right provide lift factor analysis.

Census and survey data analysis with hotspot.

For more information, click Hot spot Analysis.

Hotspot is a main feature of CMSR Data Miner. Download is available from Data Mining Software.

Drill-down Segmentation Analysis - Decision tree

Decision tree divides populations into smaller segments repeatedly. At each node, it selects a single variable in such a way that values of the variable boost proportions of a largest categorical value in each resulting segments. For marketing survey analysis, this can lead to segmentation that maximizes the proportion of positive marketing responses. For more, read Decision Tree Software.

Direct mail marketing - decision tree segmentation. Direct mail marketing - lift analysis. Gains chart for response modeling.

Interviewer Falsification and Detection

Survey is very important part of scientific and marketing research. When survey responses are collected with falsified information, the consequence is very damaging. Survey falsification can occur if interviewers do not collect information as described by survey designers. To assure that collected survey data do not cotain falsified information, identification of falsified survey data is required. For more, please read Interviewer Falsification.

Census and Marketing

National census includes various demographic and psychographic information on residents of geographical segments: median income, age, education, and so on. Census summary data can be used for marketing purposes. Census summary data are available from;

For more about how cesus data can be used in marketing, read on;
  - Database Marketing.

  - Direct Mail Marketing.

  - Geographic Segmentation.


Thorough Systematic Accurate Analysis

The benefit that Hotspot analysis provides is that thorough systematic accurate analysis is possible instantaneously. This frees analysts from time-consuming statistical analysis processes and allows them to focus on interpretation of hotspots identified.