This advanced Data Mining assessment applies the Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) process to a real-world customer-service analytics scenario. Acting as a Data Scientist, students analyse a historical Customer Service Escalation Risk dataset to help an organisation reduce serious and legal customer escalations by identifying early signs of dissatisfaction, service bottlenecks and operational risk. The findings are intended to support business decisions relating to staffing, employee training, customer-journey improvement and escalation prevention. The dataset contains information covering customer demographics, account characteristics, communication channels, issue categories, operational measures such as wait times, transfers and SLA breaches, behavioural indicators including sentiment and response delays, and commercial variables such as monthly fees and contract value. The target variable contains four escalation outcomes: No escalation, Minor escalation, Serious escalation and Legal escalation. The first stage requires data exploration, visualisation and summary, including examination of variable distributions, dataset structure, descriptive characteristics and potential data-quality issues. Students then perform appropriate data cleaning, transformation, feature engineering and preprocessing. Particular attention must be given to variables that could introduce prediction leakage because of their meaning, timing or reliability. The supervised-learning component requires development and tuning of predictive models using suitable techniques such as k-nearest neighbours, Decision Trees, Support Vector Machines, ensembles or neural networks. Models must be evaluated using appropriate multiclass metrics and compared systematically, with interpretation of influential features and model behaviour. The assessment also requires unsupervised learning. After removing the escalation target, students apply and compare clustering approaches such as K-Means and hierarchical clustering. Appropriate preprocessing, encoding, normalisation or dimensionality reduction may be used, with visualisations such as PCA, t-SNE or scatterplots used to explore cluster structure and its relationship with escalation behaviour. Overall, the project assesses the student's ability to independently design a coherent KDD workflow, justify analytical decisions, compare alternative modelling approaches and communicate actionable findings to both technical and executive audiences. Overview word count: approximately 350 words. AI-use note: the brief permits AI tools only to assist with small, specific code snippets. Any AI-generated code must be clearly acknowledged and cited, while the submitted coding, analysis, interpretation and decision-making must remain the student's own work.
Data Mining · Knowledge Discovery in Databases · KDD · Customer Service Analytics · Escalation Risk · Predictive Modelling · Machine Learning · Data Exploration · Data Visualisation · Data Cleaning · Feature Engineering · Data Preprocessing
Megaminds has supported academic requirements in data mining / data science, data mining and related disciplines.