Download Some Interesting Problems

Some Interesting Problems
Rakesh Agrawal
IBM Almaden Research Center
Foundations
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What is data mining
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A collection of techniques?
A set of composable operations (a la
Relational Algebra)?
Hints:
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Inductive Databases (Mannila)
Relational Calculus + Statistical Quantifiers
(Imielinski)
Privacy Implications
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Can we build accurate data models while
preserving privacy of individual records?
Hints
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Randomization (Agrawal & Srikant): Replace
x by x+y where y is drawn from a known
distribution
Anonymization (Crypto literature)
Web Mining: Beyond Click
Streams
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Mining knowledge bases from the web
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Completeness
Accuracy
Malicious Spam
Hints:
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Brin’s Book experiment
etc. etc.
Web Mining: Beyond hrefs
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What other social behaviors exist on the
web and how to make use of them?
Hints:
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Viral marketing paper in this conf
etc. etc.
Actionable Patterns
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Principled use of domain knowledge for
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discarding uninteresting patterns
performance
Hints:
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Papers in the recent KDD conferences
Simultaneous mining over
multiple data types
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Not just
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Relational tables
Time series
Textual documents
But patterns across all of them
Some more problems
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Online, incremental algorithms over data
streams
When to retire the past data
Long sequential patterns
Discovering richer patterns (trees and dags)
Automatic, data-dependent selection of
algorithm parameters
What not to work on?

The field is too young!
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Too early to say we don’t need new
algorithms
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Let every flower bloom!!!
Impressive results of the PVSM algorithm
Emphasize evaluation and benchmarks
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Interesting research issues
Applications most likely to
benefit from data mining
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Web applications (I think)
Bioinformatics (I hope!)
Inhibitors
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Insufficient skill base (Education)
Usability
The true delight is in the finding
out, rather than in the knowing.
Isaac Asimov