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

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 is the step, or series of steps, that populates Analysis Services objects with data from relational data sources. Models cannot be used until they have been deployed and processed.

Ensuring Consistency with HoldoutSeed

When you deploy a project and process the structure and models, individual rows in your data structure are randomly assigned to the training and testing set based on a random number seed. Typically, the random number seed is computed based on attributes of the data structure. For the purposes of this tutorial, 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 random sampling 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; instead, it ensures that the partition can be repeated.

For more information on holdout seed, see Partitioning Data into Training and Testing Sets (Analysis Services - Data Mining).

To set the HoldoutSeed

  1. Click on the Mining Structures tab or the Mining Models tab in Data Mining Designer in Business Intelligence Development Studio.

    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 process a mining structure, a specific mining model that is associated with a mining structure, or the structure and all the models that are associated with that structure. For this task, we 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 - <structure> dialog box.

There are multiple ways to process a model and structure. For more information, see the following topics:

See Also

Concepts