PRESISTANT: Learning based assistant for data pre-processing

Data pre-processing is one of the most time consuming and relevant steps in a data analysis process (e.g., classification task). A given data pre-processing operator can have positive, negative, or zero impact on the final result of the analysis. Expert users have the required knowledge to find the...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Bilalli, Besim|||0000-0002-0575-2389, Abelló Gamazo, Alberto|||0000-0002-3223-2186, Aluja Banet, Tomàs|||0000-0003-3096-0339, Wrembel, Robert
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2019
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repositorio:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/169293
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/169293
https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.datak.2019.101727
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Decision trees
Data mining
Information storage and retrieval systems
Data pre-processing
Meta-learning
Arbres de decisió
Mineria de dades
Informació -- Sistemes d'emmagatzematge i recuperació
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Sistemes d'informació
Descripción
Sumario:Data pre-processing is one of the most time consuming and relevant steps in a data analysis process (e.g., classification task). A given data pre-processing operator can have positive, negative, or zero impact on the final result of the analysis. Expert users have the required knowledge to find the right pre-processing operators. However, when it comes to non-experts, they are overwhelmed by the amount of pre-processing operators and it is challenging for them to find operators that would positively impact their analysis (e.g., increase the predictive accuracy of a classifier). Existing solutions either assume that users have expert knowledge, or they recommend pre-processing operators that are only “syntactically” applicable to a dataset, without taking into account their impact on the final analysis. In this work, we aim at providing assistance to non-expert users by recommending data pre-processing operators that are ranked according to their impact on the final analysis. We developed a tool, PRESISTANT, that uses Random Forests to learn the impact of pre-processing operators on the performance (e.g., predictive accuracy) of 5 different classification algorithms, such as Decision Tree (J48), Naive Bayes, PART, Logistic Regression, and Nearest Neighbor (IBk). Extensive evaluations on the recommendations provided by our tool, show that PRESISTANT can effectively help non-experts in order to achieve improved results in their analytic tasks.