Have you noticed that after you surf the web, you almost immediately get ads personalized for you? According to the Wall Street Journal (10/18 /2010), much of your personal information has probably been sold to marketing or tracking companies. How much can these companies really see about your data and your purchase patterns? This workshop will be a practical introduction to and an overview of the techniques used by companies around the world, that together have been called data mining, business analytics and predictive analytics. Some of the better known of these that we'll illustrate include neural networks, decision trees and K-nearest neighbors. Using real data from various industries we'll examine both the power and the limitations of the methods. No previous knowledge other than a familiarity with regression is assumed.