Summary

Congratulations for making it this far. You should have a basic understanding of the data mining concepts and how data mining can have an impact on your organization. Data mining is not just a tool; its a process of understanding business needs and data issues, working through various alternative models, testing and validating their viability, rolling them out into production, and making sure they address the opportunity and dont get stale.

Early in the chapter we reviewed some basic data mining concepts, describing how data mining is used for several different business tasks : classification, estimation or regression, prediction, association or affinity grouping, clustering or segmentation, anomaly detection, and description and profiling. We then discussed SQL Server 2005s data mining architecture and toolset, reviewing the key components and showing how they fit together. Digging down into the technology, we briefly described the seven algorithms provided with the product and how they applied to the various business tasks.

Next we went into some detail on the process of data mining, outlining a step-by-step approach starting with identifying business opportunities and the associated data, moving through the actual data mining phase with its data preparation, model development, and model validation steps, and ending with the operations phase with the implementation of the model, maintenance, and an assessment of its impact.

Most of the second part of the chapter walked through this process based on two data mining scenarios: a large international lending organization that wants to cluster and classify cities, and an Adventure Works Cycles marketing person who wants to increase the number of web site visitors who become customers by offering targeted product recommendations.

By this point, we hope its clear that data mining is a powerful set of tools the DW/BI team can use to add significant, measurable business value. And that the SQL Server Data Mining toolset is effective, easy to use, and easy to incorporate into your overall system environment.

We encourage the data miner on the team or in the organization to explore the data mining capabilities of SQL Server 2005. We also encourage everyone who uses the data mining tools to be careful with them. Data mining is a true power tool. As with a chainsaw, you can do amazing things, but you can also hurt yourself. It doesnt help your credibility if you roll out a model based on the clever finding that customers who have been with you longer tend to have purchased more items.



Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit. With SQL Server 2005 and the Microsoft Business Intelligence Toolset
The MicrosoftВ Data Warehouse Toolkit: With SQL ServerВ 2005 and the MicrosoftВ Business Intelligence Toolset
ISBN: B000YIVXC2
EAN: N/A
Year: 2006
Pages: 125

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