Date 9/800: Mining structure and model

Date 9/800: Mining structure and model

Structures and Models As detailed in Chapter 3, SQL Server Analysis Services has two major objects that deal with data mining: mining structures and mining models. A mining structure defines the domain of a mining problem, whereas a mining model is the application of a mining algorithm to the data in a mining structure. A mining structure contains a list of structure columns that have data and content types, bindings to the data source, and some optional flags that control how the data is modeled. Additionally, a mining structure contains a list of mining models that use the columns from the structure. The definition of a mining model contains an algorithm with its associated parameters, plus a list of columns from the mining structure. Each model in a structure can use a different algorithm, or the same algorithm with different parameters, and/or a different subset of the columns in the structure. For each column in the model, you can assign how it is to be used in that model, as well as algorithm-specific modeling flags. This feature allows you to easily test different hypotheses on the same data set.