Determining the Next Steps

By now, you've produced results, evaluated your data mining experiences, and may be wondering, Where to next? This phase helps you to answer that question in light of your business goals for data mining. Essentially, you have two choices at this point:

• Continue to the deployment phase. The next phase will help you to incorporate the model results into your business process and produce a final report. Even if your data mining efforts were unsuccessful, you should use the deployment phase of CRISP-DM to create a final report for distribution to the project sponsor.
• Go back and refine or replace your models. If you find that your results are almost, but not quite, optimal, consider another round of modeling. You can take what you've learned in this phase and use it to refine the models and produce better results.

Your decision at this point involves the accuracy and relevancy of the modeling results. If the results address your data mining and business goals, then you are ready for the deployment phase. Whatever decision you make, be sure to document the evaluation process thoroughly.