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Intelligent Miner Add-in for Microsoft Excel
A tool that allows DB2 data mining through a spreadsheet.
Date Posted: April 20, 2004
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Update: August 8, 2006
New version has been modified to work with the newly-available DB2 Data Warehouse Edition 9.1.
What is Intelligent Miner Add-In for Microsoft Excel?
This tool makes DB2's Data Mining available for Microsoft® Excel™ users via an Excel add-in. It serves as a spreadsheet client for DB2's Data Mining; that is, for the following DB2 extenders: IBM DB2 Intelligent Miner™ Modeling, Scoring, and Visualization (all part of DB2 Data Warehouse Edition 9.1). These components provide data mining within DB2 with a SQL API. Users can integrate these products in SQL and Java applications or simply run data mining from withing DB2. Developing such applications or SQL calls respectively is now made easier though this Excel add-in. Users can work with the add-in in a "play around" mode and, whenever the result is satisfactory, they can grab the SQL "source code," which is displayed in the tool for re-use in their applicatons.
The current version of this tool supports the following:
- Prediction of a column (classification and regression), such as predicting customer behavior (buy vs. not buy), quality (item defective vs. item OK)
- Finding of groups (clustering), such as customer groups
- Finding of rules (associations), such as finding relationships between the different columns in a table
- Finding of column explanations (classification). Finds logical conditions for each value in the target column
- Explaining a column value (associations and classification). Finds rules that explain a selected value in the target column
- Finding deviations. Uses clustering to find atypical records in a table
- Finding important fields (classification and regression). Determines which columns are most important to explain the target column
- Enabling the Intelligent Miner functions in a DB2 database.
It serves the following needs:
- Easily demonstrating the value of data mining without having vertical applications
- Easily demonstrating the concept of data mining in DB2 with a SQL API (for example, in a proof of concept)
- Performing quick and simple data mining.
Together with Easy Mining Procedures, now an integrated part of DB2 Data Warehouse Edition, this tool is a significant step towards developer efficiency.
How does it work?
IBM DB2 Intelligent Miner Scoring and Modeling comes with a SQL API. Microsoft Excel acts as client application against this API. Data mining can be performed remotely or locally on the DB2 server. The access to the DB2 database is through Microsoft's ActiveX Data Objects and the IBM OLE DB provider for DB2.
After installation of the DB2 Intelligent Miner Excel Add-In, the pop-up menu DB2 Data Mining is added to the Microsoft Excel menu bar. By selecting this pop-up menu, the DB2 Intelligent Miner mining functions can be used. The data is located on the database server and the results are displayed in an Excel spreadsheet.
The SQL generated to invoke DB2 Intelligent Miner can be reviewed. This allows one to learn the underlying SQL API.
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| | About the technology author(s):
The technology was developed by members of the DB2 Intelligent Miner development team in the IBM development laboratory, Boeblingen, Germany.
Norman Hoch, the original developer of this technology, is a student at the Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft (University of Applied Sciences) Dresden, Germany. During his internship at the IBM SW development lab in Böblingen, Germany, he joined the data-mining team. He contributed major parts of the Intelligent Miner Add-In for MS Excel.
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