Processing Models in the Targeted Mailing Structure (Basic Data Mining Tutorial)

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Applies To: SQL Server 2016 Preview

Before you can browse or work with the mining models that you have created, you must deploy the Analysis Services project and process the mining structure and mining models.

  • Deploying sends the project to a server and creates any objects in that project on the server.

  • Processing populates Analysis Services objects with data from relational data sources.

Models cannot be used until they have been deployed and processed. Also, when you make any changes to the model, such as adding new data, you must redeploy and reprocess the models.

Ensuring Consistency with HoldoutSeed

When you deploy a project and process the structure and models, individual rows in your data structure are assigned to either the training set or testing set based on a numerical seed value. By default, the numerical seed value is computed based on attributes of the data structure. However, if you ever change some aspects of your model, the seed value would change, leading to subtly different results. Therefore, in order to ensure that your results are the same as described here, we will arbitrarily assign a fixed holdout seed of 12. The holdout seed is used to initialize the sampling algorithm, and ensures that the data is partitioned in roughly the same way for all mining structures and their models.

This value does not affect the number of cases in the training set; it simply ensures that the same partitioning method will be used each time you build the model.

For more information on holdout seed, see Training and Testing Data Sets.

To set the Holdout Seed

  1. Click on the Mining Structure tab or the Mining Models tab in Data Mining Designer in SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT).

    Targeted Mailing MiningStructure displays in the Properties pane.

  2. Ensure that the Properties pane is open by pressing F4.

  3. Ensure that CacheMode is set to KeepTrainingCases.

  4. Enter 12 for HoldoutSeed.

Deploying and Processing the Models

In Data Mining Designer, you can decide which objects to process, depending on the scope of changes you’ve made to your model or the underlying data:

For this task, because the data and the models are new, you will process the structure and all the models at the same time.

To deploy the project and process all the mining models

  1. In the Mining Model menu, select Process Mining Structure and All Models.

    If you made changes to the structure, you will be prompted to build and deploy the project before processing the models. Click Yes.

  2. Click Run in the Processing Mining Structure - Targeted Mailing dialog box.

    The Process Progress dialog box opens to display the details of model processing. Model processing might take some time, depending on your computer.

  3. Click Close in the Process Progress dialog box after the models have completed processing.

  4. Click Close in the Processing Mining Structure - dialog box.

Previous Task in Lesson

Adding New Models to the Targeted Mailing Structure (Basic Data Mining Tutorial)

Next Lesson

Lesson 4: Exploring the Targeted Mailing Models (Basic Data Mining Tutorial)

See Also

Processing Requirements and Considerations (Data Mining)