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March 25, 2010 – Rexer Analytics announced this week the results of the Third Annual Data Miner Survey, which assessed the experiences, priorities, views and challenges of 710 respondents from the data mining community through an online survey. Results showed that most data miners feel that the economy will not negatively impact them, and almost half of industry data miners rate the analytic capabilities of their company as above average or excellent. The study was conducted in 2009 as a service to the data mining community and was not sponsored by any third party.

Rexer Analytics found that when asked what would happen if economic slump continued, only 28 percent of respondents thought the number of data mining projects would decrease. “Data miners were optimistic,” says Karl Rexer, president of Rexer Analytics. “This speaks to the strength of the data mining field and the importance that companies are placing on data mining.”

The top challenges facing data miners are dirty data, explaining data mining to others and difficult access to data. However, in 2009 fewer data miners listed data quality and data access as challenges than in the previous year.

IBM SPSS Modeler (SPSS Clementine), Statistica, and IBM SPSS Statistics (SPSS Statistics) are identified as the primary tools used by the most data miners. Open source tools Weka and R and are increasingly used by large numbers of both academic and for-profit data miners. Users of IBM SPSS Modeler, Statistica, and Rapid Miner are the most satisfied with their software. SAS Enterprise Miner dropped in data miner’s tool rankings this year.

Information on obtaining a free copy of the report is available at RexerAnalytics.com.

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Valerie Valentine is senior editor for Information Management. You can follow her on Twitter @ValValentineIM.