Data Science for Business: What You Need to Know about Data Mining and Data-Analytic Thinking

by Foster Provost

Profiling (also known as behavior description) attempts to characterize the typical behavior of an individual, group, or population. An example profiling question would be: “What is the typical cell phone usage of this customer segment?” Behavior may not have a simple description; profiling cell phone usage might require a complex description of night and weekend airtime averages, international usage, roaming charges, text minutes, and so on. Behavior can be described generally over an entire population, or down to the level of small groups or even individuals. Profiling is often used to establish behavioral norms for anomaly detection applications such as fraud detection and monitoring for intrusions to computer systems (such as someone breaking into your iTunes account).