Lesson 4: Exploring the Targeted Mailing Models (Basic Data Mining Tutorial)
After the models in your project are processed, you can explore them in Business Intelligence Development Studio to look for interesting trends. Because the results of mining models are complex and can be difficult to understand in a raw format, visually investigating the data is often the easiest way to understand the rules and relationships that the algorithms have discovered within the data. Exploring also helps you to understand the behavior of the model and discover which model performs best before you deploy it.
Each model you created is listed in the Mining Model Viewer tab in Data Mining Designer. Each algorithm that you used to build a model in Analysis Services returns a different type of result. Therefore, Analysis Services provides a separate viewer for each algorithm. Analysis Services also provides a generic viewer that works for all model types. The Generic Content Tree Viewer displays detailed model content information that varies depending on the algorithm that was used. For more information, see Viewing Model Details with the Microsoft Generic Content Tree Viewer.
In this lesson you will look at the same data using your three models. Each model type is based on a different algorithm and provides different insights into the data. The Decision Tree model tells you about factors that influence bike buying. The Clustering model groups your customers by attributes that include their bike buying behavior and other selected attributes. The Naive Bayes model enables you to explore the relationship between different attributes. Finally, the Generic Content Tree Viewer reveals the structure of the model and provides richer detail including formulas, patterns that were extracted, and a count of cases in a cluster or a particular tree.
Click on the following topics to explore the mining model viewers.