We will begin our discussion with an introduction to the data mining life cycle, and this chapter will focus on its first three stages. You are expected to have a basic understanding of the Microsoft Business Intelligence stack and familiarity of terms such as extract, transform, and load (ETL), data warehouse, and so on. This chapter builds on this basic understanding.
We will cover the following topics in this chapter:
Data mining life cycle
Identifying the goal
Staging data
Understanding and cleansing data