7027713
Discovery-Driven Exploration of OLAP Data Cubes
Analysts predominantly use OLAP data cubes to identify regions of anomalies that may represent problem areas or new opportunities. The current OLAP systems support hypothesis-driven exploration of data cubes through operations such as drill-down, roll-up, and selection. Using these operations, an analyst navigates unaided through a huge search space looking at large number of values to spot exceptions. We propose a new discovery-driven exploration paradigm that mines the data for such exceptions and summarizes the exceptions at appropriate levels in advance. It then uses these exceptions to lead the analyst to interesting regions of the cube during navigation. We present the statistical foundation underlying our approach. We then discuss the computational issue of finding exceptions in data and making the process efficient on large multidimensional data bases.
207676583
Privacy-preserving data mining
A fruitful direction for future data mining research will be the development of techniques that incorporate privacy concerns. Specifically, we address the following question. Since the primary task in data mining is the development of models about aggregated data, can we develop accurate models without access to precise information in individual data records? We consider the concrete case of building a decision-tree classifier from training data in which the values of individual records have been perturbed. The resulting data records look very different from the original records and the distribution of data values is also very different from the original distribution. While it is not possible to accurately estimate original values in individual data records, we propose a novel reconstruction procedure to accurately estimate the distribution of original data values. By using these reconstructed distributions, we are able to build classifiers whose accuracy is comparable to the accuracy of classifiers built with the original data.
52849452
Integrating association rule mining with relational database systems: alternatives and implications
Data mining on large data warehouses is becoming increasingly important. In support of this trend, we consider a spectrum of architectural alternatives for coupling mining with database systems. These alternatives include: loose-coupling through a SQL cursor interface; encapsulation of a mining algorithm in a stored procedure; caching the data to a file system on-the-fly and mining; tight-coupling using primarily user-defined functions; and SQL implementations for processing in the DBMS. We comprehensively study the option of expressing the mining algorithm in the form of SQL queries using Association rule mining as a case in point. We consider four options in SQL-92 and six options in SQL enhanced with object-relational extensions (SQL-OR). Our evaluation of the different architectural alternatives shows that from a performance perspective, the Cache-Mine option is superior, although the performance of the SQL-OR option is within a factor of two. Both the Cache-Mine and the SQL-OR approaches incur a higher storage penalty than the loose-coupling approach which performance-wise is a factor of 3 to 4 worse than Cache-Mine. The SQL-92 implementations were too slow to qualify as a competitive option. We also compare these alternatives on the basis of qualitative factors like automatic parallelization, development ease, portability and inter-operability.
14705676
Parallel Mining of Association Rules
We consider the problem of mining association rules on a shared nothing multiprocessor. We present three algorithms that explore a spectrum of trade-offs between computation, communication, memory usage, synchronization, and the use of problem specific information. The best algorithm exhibits near perfect scaleup behavior, yet requires only minimal overhead compared to the current best serial algorithm.
52857598
Privacy preserving mining of association rules
2034508
High-dimensional similarity joins
Many emerging data mining applications require a similarity join between points in a high-dimensional domain. We present a new algorithm that utilizes a new index structure, called the /spl epsiv/-kdB tree, for fast spatial similarity joins on high-dimensional points. This index structure reduces the number of neighboring leaf nodes that are considered for the join test, as well as the traversal cost of finding appropriate branches in the internal nodes. The storage cost for internal nodes is independent of the number of dimensions. Hence the proposed index structure scales to high-dimensional data. Empirical evaluation, using synthetic and real-life datasets, shows that similarity join using the /spl epsiv/-kdB tree is 2 to an order of magnitude faster than the R/sup +/ tree, with the performance gap increasing with the number of dimensions.
9257184
Mining Process Models from Workflow Logs
Modern enterprises increasingly use the workflow paradigm to prescribe how business processes should be performed. Processes are typically modeled as annotated activity graphs. We present an approach for a system that constructs process models from logs of past, unstructured executions of the given process. The graph so produced conforms to the dependencies and past executions present in the log. By providing models that capture the previous executions of the process, this technique allows easier introduction of a workflow system and evaluation and evolution of existing process models. We also present results from applying the algorithm to synthetic data sets as well as process logs obtained from an IBM Flowmark installation.