Interactive data mining system

• US 7,979,362 B2
• Filed: 08/10/2007
• Issued: 07/12/2011
• Est. Priority Date: 08/10/2007
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Motorola Solutions, Inc.
• Original Assignee: Motorola Solutions, Inc.
• Inventors: Liu, Bing, Xiao, Weimin, Benkler, Jeffrey G., Zhao, Kaidi
• Primary Examiner(s): Gaffin; Jeffrey A
• Assistant Examiner(s): Bharadwaj; Kalpana
• Application Number:
  US11/836,849
• Publication Number:
  US 20090043714A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,432 Days
• Field of Search: None
• US Class Current: 706/11
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/2462 Approximate or statistical queries
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/2465 Query processing support for facilitating data mining operations in structured databases
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/904 Browsing; Visualisation therefor for navigating the web G06F16/954; browsing optimisation for the web G06F16/957
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2216/03 Data mining

Abstract

An interactive data mining system (100, 3000) that is suitable for data mining large high dimensional (e.g., 200 dimension) data sets is provided. The system graphically presents rules in a context allowing users to readily gain an intuitive appreciation of the significance of important attributes (data fields) in the data. The system (100, 3000) uses metrics to quantify the importance of the various data attributes, data values, attribute/value pairs, ranks them according to the metrics and displays histograms and lists of attributes and values in order according to the metric, thereby allowing the user to rapidly find the most interesting aspects of the data. The system explores the impact of user defined constraints and presents histograms and rule cubes including superposed and interleaved rule cubes showing the effect of the constraints.

Claims

1. A non-transitory computer-readable medium storing a program for interactive data mining including programming instructions for:

reading in a set of data vectors wherein each data vector comprises a class attribute, and a plurality of additional attributes;

counting a plurality of counts of times each particular attribute of said plurality of additional attributes, takes on each of a set of possible values for the particular attribute; and

presenting a plurality of histograms on a computer display wherein each of said plurality of histograms includes counts for one of said plurality of additional attributes versus attribute value and wherein said plurality of histograms are presented in a sorted order;

wherein said sorted order is based on a sorting-of the histograms according to a metric of non-randomness of distributions shown in said histograms;

wherein the metric of non-randomness is a metric of discriminative power with respect to said class attribute.

2. The computer-readable medium according to claim 1 wherein said counting is subject to at least one constraint on at least one of said plurality of additional attributes.

3. The computer-readable medium according to claim 1 including additional programming instructions for:

discretizing attribute values of at least a subset of attributes in said set of data vectors prior to counting said plurality of counts.

4. The computer-readable medium according to claim 1 wherein the programming instructions for presenting the plurality of histograms on the computer display present different histograms corresponding to different values of the class attribute.

5. The computer-readable medium according to claim 4 wherein for each additional attribute the histograms corresponding to a set of values of the class attribute are arranged in a column on the computer display.

6. The computer-readable medium according to claim 5 wherein said metric on non-randomness is summed over a said set of values of said class attribute.

7. The computer-readable medium according to claim 1 wherein in response to a user designating one of said plurality of histograms showing an enlarged version of the designated histogram on the computer display.

8. The computer-readable medium according to claim 1 wherein said histograms are augmented by up and down arrows located proximate said histograms to show trend type.

9. The computer-readable medium according to claim 1 wherein certain of said histograms are truncated to show only a portion of attribute values and are color coded to indicate truncation.

10. The computer-readable medium according to claim 1 including additional programming instructions for automatically scaling the plurality of histograms.