A case-based reasoning system for recommendation of data cleaning algorithms in classification and regression tasks

Abstract

Recently, advances in Information Technologies (social networks, mobile applications, Internet of Things, etc.) generate a deluge of digital data; but to convert these data into useful information for business decisions is a growing challenge. Exploiting the massive amount of data through knowledge discovery (KD) process includes identifying valid, novel, potentially useful and understandable patterns from a huge volume of data. However, to prepare the data is a non-trivial refinement task that requires technical expertise in methods and algorithms for data cleaning. Consequently, the use of a suitable data analysis technique is a headache for inexpert users. To address these problems, we propose a case-based reasoning system (CBR) to recommend data cleaning algorithms for classification and regression tasks. In our approach, we represent the problem space by the meta-features of the dataset, its attributes, and the target variable. The solution space contains the algorithms of data cleaning used for each dataset. We represent the cases through a Data Cleaning Ontology. The case retrieval mechanism is composed of a filter and similarity phases. In the first phase, we defined two filter approaches based on clustering and quartile analysis. These filters retrieve a reduced number of relevant cases. The second phase computes a ranking of the retrieved cases by filter approaches, and it scores a similarity between a new case and the retrieved cases. The retrieval mechanism proposed was evaluated through a set of judges. The panel of judges scores the similarity between a query case against all cases of the case-base (ground truth). The results of the retrieval mechanism reach an average precision on judges ranking of 94.5% in top 3, for top 7 84.55%, while in top 10 78.35%.