Abuzz has created something I find both exciting and spooky: a more informative organism bred from machine and human. Beehive is a computer broker that brings together human experts with different specializations. Students of biology will note this parallels important evolutionary events, such as the aggregation and differentiation of single-celled organisms into more effective multicelled organisms.
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Clustering. Sometimes called segmentation, clustering identifies people who share common characteristics, and averages those characteristics to form a "characteristic vector" or "centroid." Clustering systems usually let you specify how many clusters to identify within a group of profiles, and then try to find the set of clusters that best represents the most profiles.
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Clustering is used directly by some vendors to provide reports on general characteristics of different visitor groups. These techniques require training, and suffer from drift on Web sites with dynamic Web pages. (Again, see the article "Tracking Users," Web Techniques, July 1999.)
Estimation and Prediction. Estimation guesses an unknown value, such as income, when you know other things about a person. Prediction guesses a future value, such as the probability of buying a car next year, when a person hasn't done it yet, or the expected number of stocks that a person will trade in the coming year. The same algorithms can perform estimation and prediction.
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Estimation is often used in demographics to fill in the blanks. If you don't know what income a person has, an estimator can identify other variables that correlate well with income -- such as location, car preference, job title -- then find other people with similar traits and use them to estimate income and confidence value.
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Prediction can compute important future attributes of a person -- such as lifetime monetary value, next visit interval, learning speed, promotion susceptibility, and so on -- based on the same approach. These values can be used in personalization applications.
