Mining Data to Predict Equipment Failure

by Curt Hall

Several weeks ago, a reader contacted me regarding a BI Advisor in which I said that I'd noticed a growing interest by end-user organizations in using data mining technology -- particularly for predictive customer analytics (see "How Do Your Data Mining and Predictive Analytics Grow?," 23 February 2010). He pointed out to me a very exciting area of data mining that seeks to apply the technology to predict when equipment will fail. Predictive maintenance is an application area of data mining that is really taking off.