Orange and Decisions-at-Hand: Bridging Predictive Data Mining and Decision Support

Data mining is often used to develop predictive models from data, but rarely address how these models are to be employed. The use of the model is often non-trivial, and requires from the user the knowledge of how to run an often complex data mining suite in which the model has been constructed. A better mechanism for the communication of resulting models and less complex, easy to use tools for their employment are needed. We propose a technological solution to the problem, where a predictive model is encoded in XML and then used through a Webor Palm handheld-based decision support shell. This schema supports developer-to-user and user-to-user communication, while to facilitate the communication between the developers we advocate the use of data mining scripts.