Microsoft® Business Intelligence For Dummies®

Chapter 7. Data Mining for Information Gold

In This Chapter

• Knowing data mining and its role in the BI process

• Understanding data mining in the Microsoft world

• Discovering the Microsoft Data Mining tools

• Applying the Microsoft Data Mining algorithms

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

—Henry Ford

To obtain solid information about your business, you need data, and lots of it. Data are used in all sorts of ways in order to get usable business information — these include creating reports and conducting analyses. But often the data you need are not at all obvious; they're buried under other data or hidden in proprietary formats in scattered systems. If that data are going to do your organization any good, data have to be found, dug out, and unlocked.

How much data about your business do you have available? Often as much as you can gather — and computer systems can gather a whopping amount. Unlocking as much of that data as possible — and finding useful patterns in it, in real time — can give your organization a competitive advantage. That's why one of the handiest tools in the Microsoft BI arsenal is a capability that treats your data as a valuable raw resource just waiting to be refined into information. It's called data mining, and it's what this chapter is all about.

Going Deep with Data Mining

Data mining is the process of using complex mathematical algorithms to search for patterns in large amounts of data. Because computers are great at crunching ...