MiningMart Approach Part IV

One of the project’s objectives is to set up a case-base of successful cases on the internet. The shared knowledge allows all internet users to benefit from a new case. Submitting a new case of best practice is a safe advertisement for KDD specialists or service providers, since the relational data model is kept private. Only the conceptual and the case model is published. Currently, the project as developed three cases, analsis for direct mailing, for fraud detection in telecommunication, and for sales prediction.

To support users in finding the most relevant cases, their inherent structure is exploited. An according internet interface was set up, visualizing the conceptual metadata. It is possible to navigate through the case-base and investigate single steps i.e., which operators were used on which kind of concepts. The internet interface reads the data directly from the M4 tables in the database, avoiding redundancies.

Additionally to the data explicitly represented in M4, a business level is added. This level aims at relating the case to business goals and to give several kinds of additional descriptions, like which success criteria were important for the case. Especially the more informal descriptions should help decision makers to find a case tailored for their specific domain and problem. The additional information is stored in an XML-representation, directly connected to the M4 entities.

It is possible to start the search for a case at each category of the business level or conceptual level. In this sense the cases are indexed by all the categories part of the conceptual M4 model and the business model. If a user considers a case useful, then its conceptual data can be downloaded from the server. The downloadable case itself is a file exported from the MiningMart system, which can be imported by any other user of the system. If problems arise, or further help is necessary, the business level holds a category with contact information about the case designer or the company that provided the service.

Please find the case base here.