I have written quite a lot of reports, highlighting results from a wide range of activities. Based on the feedback received and from the requests of changes intervened from the first version to the definitive one, I can tell you the following basic principles for producing a good data mining report:
- Clearly show the objectives and questions that initiated the analyses performed
- Explicitly highlight the assumptions made when performing the analyses
- Enumerate and get into the details with data treatment applied to analyzed data
- Always verify that the reproduced data is consistent
- Provide data lineage to the maximum possible extent
Let's get a bit deeper into these principles before we actually develop our report.