Patterns determination

[bobatwork]

Hi,

I am a neophyte when it comes to data mining; i.e. I have read a
signigicant number of books on data mining but haven't actually
used any programs yet. But I believe there would be value added
to the governmental agency I now work for to be able to discover
patterns. I work for a local county social services agency.
My question then reduces to which data mining programs produce
patterns? We are not looking for predictive capabilities just yet.
BTW we have SQL 2000 but it doesn't seem to have pattern
determination as one of its deliverables.
Thanks in advance. Bob

 

[MrClem]

If you already have SQL Server 2000, then you could simply use Analysis Services to build a cluster data mining model. In SQL Server help see 'Create Mining Model'.

As you probably know, clustering is a method to find patterns (group records/rows based upon similarity) and has no predictive capability.

The leading data mining product is Clementine from SPSS. See

http://www.spss.com/SPSSBI/Clementine

It provides a wide array of modelling methods, including Clustering, Neural Nets, Decision Trees, Association rules etc. It also supports exporting of models as PMML (which you could import into SQL Server if you wished). As a Clementine user I'm biased, but honestly you should check it out.