Data mining business intelligence

Data mining is a subset of business intelligence, which covers a broad range of analytics technologies. Often used for predictive modeling, data mining tools can also help organizations better understand relationships among variables. One core software tool is online analytical processing (OLAP), which extracts, structures and stores warehoused data to enable quick, multidimensional analysis. A dimension can be any variable your company tracks: customer locations, sales volumes, product development costs and so on. An OLAP data set is made up of dimensions and measures, which can then be used for queries to elicit detailed data breakdowns and information on associations among variables. For example, a grill manufacturer could use an OLAP query to correlate grill sales with weather conditions across various locations, to determine how heat waves affect its business in different regions.