Predictive Analytics

Data mining can discover useful information buried in vast amounts of data. However, it is often the case that both the programming interfaces and the data mining expertise required to obtain these results are too complex for use by the wide audiences that can obtain benefits from Oracle Data Mining (ODM). The Predictive Analytics procedures Predict and Explain address both of these complexities by automating the later stages of data mining process from certain types of data preprocessing through model building to scoring new data. Predict and Explain provide an important tool that makes data mining possible for a broad audience of users, in particular, business analysts.

Data used by ODM consists of tables or views stored in an Oracle database. Each column in a record (row) holds an item of information. Data mining models are often used to identify important columns or to Predict column values. Explain ranks attributes in order of influence in explaining a target column. Predict predicts the value of a target.

Input for Predict or Explain is a table or view in an Oracle database. Each column in the table must have one of the following data types: NUMBER, FLOAT, CHAR, VARCHAR2, DATE, or TIMESTAMP.