Producing a Final Report

Writing a final report not only ties up loose ends in earlier documentation, it can also be used to communicate your results. While this may seem straightforward, it's important to present your results to the various people with a stake in the results. This can include both technical administrators who will be responsible for implementation of the modeling results as well as marketing and management sponsors who will make decisions based on your results.

Task List

First, consider the audience of your report. Are they technical developers or market-focused managers? You may need to create separate reports for each audience if their needs are disparate. In either case, your report should include most of the following points:

• A thorough description of the original business problem
• The process used to conduct data mining
• Costs of the project
• Notes on any deviations from the original project plan
• A summary of data mining results, both models and findings
• An overview of the proposed plan for deployment
• Recommendations for further data mining work, including interesting leads discovered during exploration and modeling