Harness the Power of Text Mining: Unstructured Data Analysis for Quality and Productivity Applications

Most organizations are analyzing structured numerical (and categorical) data; data from process and method development, commercial manufacturing, process monitoring, and product complaints. The collection and analysis of this data is prevalent throughout most organizations. However, the majority of stored data is not numerical; it is in the form of unstructured text in reports and documents. In fact, it is estimated that approximately 80% of data in most organizations is unstructured, text data.

This seminar will provide an overview of methods easily implemented to find previously unknown relationships from a collection of unstructured data. Learn to discover potentially useful and actionable quality and compliance insights using techniques that can be used to explore text from various sources (such as survey comments, reports, free form data fields, websites, and social media). While relevant theory will be discussed, the focus of the seminar will be on giving participants an appreciation for the practical application of text mining to real-world applications to include survey results, incident reports, product recalls, and inspection observations

Participants will be guided through end-to-end examples starting from assembling disparate text sources relevant to a quality problem, to creating a structured data table, applying analytical and graphical methods such as tabulation, cluster analysis, and decision trees, then discovering useful and actionable relationships. Software packages such as R, SAS Text Miner, Statistica, and JMP will be used.

Heath Rushing, Co-Founder and Principal, Adsurgo

Heath Rushing is the co-founder and principal of Adsurgo, a professional services company focused on the use of analytics. Previously, he was the JMP Training and Consulting Manager at SAS.  As a quality engineer at Amgen, he championed statistical principles in every business unit. He won the top teaching award out of 54 instructors in the Air Force Academy math department. Additionally, he teaches short courses in statistics, data mining, and simulation modelling for SAS.

2015 QPRC