Everyone wants to integrate data mining and predictive analytics into their finance and business processes, but how do you set yourself up for success when your team members aren’t experts in data science or predictive analytics and you’re loathe to send your data to an outside firm? Through an exploration of real-world case studies, we’ll share best practices for getting started with Oracle Data Mining and Oracle R Enterprise and compare it with the predictive analytics capabilities in Oracle Business Intelligence. We’ll review the basics of adaptive machine learning algorithms and offer a simple way to understand what they are doing. We’ll cover how to identify projects with the highest ROIs and how to properly scope projects according to where you are on the analytics maturity curve. We’ll discuss standing up sand box instances versus leveraging the cloud and also cover the tradeoffs for finance versus marketing versus logistics/operations data science projects. Bring your questions and concerns, your best ideas for potential projects, and be ready for a highly interactive, informative session.