As you have seen, Analysis Services enables you to build powerful Business Intelligence (BI) solutions that enable users to really understand the business. However, many business problems rely on the ability to spot patterns and trends across data sets that are far too large or complex for human analysts. Data mining can be used to explore your data and find these patterns, allowing you to begin to ask why things happen and to predict what will happen in the future.

In this chapter, we look at how to use some of the data mining features in Analysis Services 2005 to perform tasks such as customer segmentation and market basket analysis. The data mining results are presented in the form of new dimensions in cubes and are used in Web applications.