Adapting the CRISP-DM Data Mining Process: A Case Study in the Financial Services Domain

Data mining techniques have gained widespread adoption over the past decades, particularly in the financial services domain. To achieve sustained benefits from these techniques, organizations have adopted standardized processes for managing data mining projects, most notably CRISP-DM. Research has shown that these standardized processes are often not used as prescribed, but instead, they are extended and adapted to address a variety of requirements. To improve the understanding of how standardized data mining processes are extended and adapted in practice, this paper reports on a case study in a financial services organization, aimed at identifying perceived gaps in the CRISP-DM process and characterizing how CRISP-DM is adapted to address these gaps. The case study was conducted based on documentation from a portfolio of data mining projects, complemented by semi-structured interviews with project participants. The results reveal 18 perceived gaps in CRISP-DM alongside their perceived impact and mechanisms employed to address these gaps. The identified gaps are grouped into six categories. The study provides practitioners with a structured set of gaps to be considered when applying CRISP-DM or similar processes in financial services. Also, number of the identified gaps are generic and applicable to other sectors with similar concerns (e.g. privacy), such as telecom, e-commerce.