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Data Mining Made Easy
Predictive Analysis is an advanced form of Business Intelligence, which uses Data Mining. In this short demo you will see how Microsoft Excel makes it easy to use.
The actual data mining engine is Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, however it remains hidden from the perspective of the end user, as it is doing all the hard work in the background.
In this video we start with a quick Shopping Basket Analysis (also known as Market Basket Analysis) done from within Excel (01:06). The underlying technology is the Microsoft Association Rules algorithm, which comes with SQL Server Analysis Services. You can see its powerful Dependency Network Viewer towards the end of the video (02:10).
We will publish a full, in-depth Data Mining course based on SQL Server, which will go into detail of what happens behind the scenes, and it will also cover the other mining techniques, such as Decision Trees, Clustering, or Neural Networks. In the meantime, enjoy this short demo as a teaser of what is to come—but also what is possible. If you would like to try it out on your own, you need to have a Microsoft SQL Server 2008 or 2008 R2 Standard or higher edition, Microsoft Office Excel 2007 or 2010 (32-bit edition), and the free Data Mining Addins for Office. If you do not have a license for the server or Excel, you can get a trial license for those products from Microsoft. You can install SQL Server with Analysis Services on the same computer as Office and the Data Mining Add-Ins. Use the provided sample file to follow my steps. Enjoy!
Jump to a chapter
- Introduction (00:08)
- Demo: Data Mining Add-ins for Excel (00:43)
- Shopping Basket Analysis in Excel (01:06)
- Association Rules Dependency Network Viewer (02:10)
- Summary (02:37)
Comments
Stefan Lund Jensen · 23 January 2012
Hi. I am really enjoying your videos and news on BI.
I have one question related to the data mining add in you are using in this video. What is the name of it? I can't find any Data mining releases for excel 2010 on the Microsoft download site. Has there been no releases?
Rafal Lukawiecki · 23 January 2012
Hi Stefan, thanks for the nice comments. The add-ins, which I use, are the Data Mining Add-ins for Office 2007. They work quite well in Office 2010, as you can see in the video, as long as you use the 32-bit edition of Office. You might need to re-enable them, as they like to disable themselves, occasionally, but it is quite easy to do: press the Office button, go to Excel options, view the disabled add-ins and re-enable dmxaddin—you will need to restart Excel. As of Jan 2012 there are no native DM add-ins for Office 2010 yet, but they are planned for the upcoming SQL launch, fingers crossed.