Predicting from a clustering model

Hi,

I have built a Clustering model that captures customer demographic information

and identify various hidden clusters based on the information.

What kind of predictions can I make using the above model?

You can do multiple types of queries with a clustering model:

Get the most likely cluster for each case (or a new singleton case) - SELECT Cluster() FROM [model]|||

Thanks Raman,

The 1st, 2nd and the 4th points are clear but I have certain doubts

regarding the 3^rd point you mentioned

Firstly as the attributes are customer characteristics like

age, gender and other demographic information and we suppose that the values

for these always exist for all the cases (new/old). What will be the point of

making them predictable and predicting their values again.

Secondly if I want to predict an attribute(s) like

MovieBuyer (determines whether a customer has bought a movie(s) or no) for new

cases, wouldn’t it be better if I use ‘decision trees’ or ‘neural networks’

algorithm rather than clustering.

Basically I cannot imagine a scenario in which clustering

stands out as the best suited algorithm for prediction.

It seems that Clustering is best suited for exploring and

understanding the data rather than for prediction.

I hope I have expressed my problem adequately and clearly.

Any help would be most appreciated.

|||

Your assessment is correct in that clustering is more suitable for data exploration/understanding - I was just pointing out that it is *possible* to do prediction with the SQL Server DM Clustering algorithm (which was your original question).

|||Thanks ramansql

Predicting from a clustering model

Hi,

I have built a Clustering model that captures customer demographic information

and identify various hidden clusters based on the information.

What kind of predictions can I make using the above model?

You can do multiple types of queries with a clustering model:

Get the most likely cluster for each case (or a new singleton case) - SELECT Cluster() FROM [model]|||

Thanks Raman,

The 1st, 2nd and the 4th points are clear but I have certain doubts

regarding the 3^rd point you mentioned

Firstly as the attributes are customer characteristics like

age, gender and other demographic information and we suppose that the values

for these always exist for all the cases (new/old). What will be the point of

making them predictable and predicting their values again.

Secondly if I want to predict an attribute(s) like

MovieBuyer (determines whether a customer has bought a movie(s) or no) for new

cases, wouldn’t it be better if I use ‘decision trees’ or ‘neural networks’

algorithm rather than clustering.

Basically I cannot imagine a scenario in which clustering

stands out as the best suited algorithm for prediction.

It seems that Clustering is best suited for exploring and

understanding the data rather than for prediction.

I hope I have expressed my problem adequately and clearly.

Any help would be most appreciated.

|||

Your assessment is correct in that clustering is more suitable for data exploration/understanding - I was just pointing out that it is *possible* to do prediction with the SQL Server DM Clustering algorithm (which was your original question).

|||Thanks raman

Possible to encrypt database assembly?

Hello.

I've built a simple Visual Basic .NET project containing the following code...

Imports System
Imports System.Data
Imports System.Data.SqlClient
Imports System.Data.SqlTypes
Imports Microsoft.SqlServer.Server

Partial Public Class StoredProcedures
<Microsoft.SqlServer.Server.SqlProcedure()> _
Public Shared Sub WhoAmI()
Using connection As New SqlConnection("context connection=true")
connection.Open()
Dim command As New SqlCommand("SELECT SUSER_SNAME()", connection)
SqlContext.Pipe.ExecuteAndSend(command)
End Using
End Sub
End Class

From Visual Studio, I want to encrypt the contents of this assembly, as a proof-of-concept.
Even though assembly contents are stored as varbinary(MAX) in the database, converting to varchar(MAX) will expose the code.

However, the Dotfuscator Community Edition reports the following error: "Dotfuscator Community Edition cannot operate on SQL Server applications.... please try Standard or Professional Edition."

Has anyone tried encrypting a database assembly and deploying to the database?

A good test would be to issue the following TSQL script against the database holding the assembly...

-- Does the sample code above run?
EXEC dbo.WhoAmI
GO
-- Is the code readable?
SELECT * , Convert(varchar(MAX), content) FROM sys.assembly_files

Hi,

There is no explicit support for encrypted assemblies in the database. You can use a code obfuscation utility to make reverse-engineering difficult, as you suggest.

Perhaps someone else has a favorite obfuscator they can recommendI don't know much about them.

Cheers,

-Isaac

|||

Note that the code you're reading from sys.assembly_files isn't related to encrypting the assembly - VS deploys your full source code and PDB files to the database to assist with debugging. If you don't want VS to do this, then you can turn it off under the project properties / Deploy / Deploy Code option. This still won't protect your assembly though as anyone can use a reflection tool such as http://www.denisbauer.com/NETTools/SQL2005Browser.aspx. Obfuscation can help here, but the real solution is to control who has access to the system views containing the assembly using metadata permissions.

Steven

|||A great answer... You've given lots of new leads. Thanks.