Lesson 2: Building a Forecasting Scenario (Intermediate Data Mining Tutorial)

As the sales analyst for Adventure Works Cycles, you have been asked to forecast the sales of individual products for the next year. In particular, you have been asked to find peak times for bike sales and to learn how sales lead or lag with regard to region. Additionally, you have been asked to determine whether sales of different products vary depending on the time of the year.

To find the requested information, in this lesson you will investigate the company's data at the monthly level, and you will also divide sales into three regions: Europe, North America, and the Pacific.

After you complete the tasks in this lesson, you will be able to answer the following questions:

  • How do the sales of different bike versions interact over time?

  • Is there a pattern to sales with regard to the three regions?

  • What time of year do sales peak?

To complete the tasks in this lesson, you will use the AdventureWorksDW2008 data source that you created in Lesson 1: Creating the Intermediate Data Mining Solution (Intermediate Data Mining Tutorial).

This lesson contains the following tasks. The lesson can be completed in two parts, if necessary. The first part introduces the basics of how to create and use a time series model, and the second part describes how to use the new features in SQL Server 2008 for cross-prediction in a time series model.

Creating a Simple Forecasting Model

Creating a General Forecasting Model for Cross-Prediction