"An essential book - Statistical Modeling and Analysis for Database Marketing: Effective Techniques for Mining Big Data - for statistical analysts building predictive models for database marketing. This is a must have ... book for the practitioner using data mining to build predictive models in industry. While it does have a few snippets of SAS© code, it is a conceptual book that explains the "why" and the "how" of practical model building. It dispenses of with the antiquated notion of the "true" model of classical statistics and econometrics, and shows how to arrive at an acceptable model that yeilds good predictions. As practitioners, this is what we care about most. Among other things, it gives good explanations of: (1) the EDA paradigm versus classical statistics (2) Tukey's bulging rule for transforming variables (3) variable selection. It discusses some of the weaknesses of automatic variable selection methods (4) smoothed scatterplots and logit plots (5) decile analysis and using bootstrapping to derive confidence intervals for cum lift.

The book shows you how to use logistic regression, OLS, and CHAID to build predictive models. For those interested in Genetic modeling, it has a clearly written chapter on the subject that explains how genetic modeling can be used to create new variables that can have more information than either of the original variables."