Data Mining: Crossing the Chasm

Rakesh Agrawal
IBM Almaden Research Center
 Thesis
• The greatest challenge facing data mining is
to make the transition from being an early
market technology to mainstream
technology
• We have the opportunity to make this
transition successful
 Outline
• Chasm in the technology adoption life cycle,
à la Geoffrey Moore†
• Experience with Quest/Intelligent Miner
• Ideas for successful chasm crossing

† Geoffrey A Moore. Crossing the Chasm. Harper Business.

http://www.chasmgroup.com
 Technology Adoption Life Cycle
Pragmatists: Stick Conservatives:
with the herd! Hold on!
Visionaries: Get
ahead of the herd! Skeptics:
No way!
Techies: Try it!
Early Early Late Laggards
Innovators
Adopters Majority Majority

Psychographic profile of each group is different

Innovators: Technology Enthusiasts
• Intrigued by any fundamental advance in
technology
• Like to alpha test new products
• Can ignore the missing elements
• Want access to top technologists
• Want no-profit pricing (preferably free)
Gatekeepers to early adopters
 Early Adopters: Visionaries
• Driven by vision of dramatic competitive
advantage via revolutionary breakthroughs
• Great imagination for strategic applications
• Not so price-sensitive
• Want rapid time to market
• Demand high degree of customization
Fund the development of early market
 Early Majority: Pragmatists
• Want sustainable productivity
improvement through evolutionary change
• Astute managers of mission-critical apps
• Understand real-world issues and tradeoffs
• Focus on proven applications; want to see
the solution in production
Bulwark of the mainstream market
 Late Majority: Conservatives
• Want to stay even with the competition
• Risk averse
• Price sensitive
• Need completely pre-assembled solutions

Extend technology life cycles

 Laggards: Skeptics
• Driven to maintain status quo
• Good at debunking marketing hype
• Disbelieve productivity-improvement
arguments
• Can be formidable opposition to early
adoption of a technology
Retard the development of high-tech markets
 Crack in the curve

Chasm

Early Market Mainstream Market

The greatest peril in the development of a high-tech market lies in

making the transition from an early market dominated by a few
visionaries to a mainstream market dominated by pragmatists.
 Visionaries vs. Pragmatists
• Adventurous • Prudent
• First strike capability • Staying power
• Early buy-in • Wait-and-see
• State of the art • Industry standard
• Think big • Manage expectation
• Spend big • Spend to budget
 Is data mining following this curve?

• Yes!!!
• My personal viewpoint based on
Quest/Intelligent Miner experience
 Quest
• Started as skunk work in early nineties
• Inspired by needs articulated by industry
visionaries:
– Transaction data collected over a long period
– Current tools/SQL don’t cut it
– About ready to throw data
 Approach
• Examine “real” applications
• Identify operations that cut across
applications
• Design fast, scalable algorithms for each
operation
• Develop applications by composing
operations
 Operations
• Associations • Classification
• Sequential Patterns • Clustering
• Similar time series • Deviations

• New Operations • Adopted from

• Completeness, Statistics/Learning
scalability • Scalability

http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/quest
 Bringing Quest to market
• Visionaries who inspired Quest did not
become first customers:
– Wanted evidence that the technology “worked”
• Frustrating attempts to interest major IBM
customers:
– Integration with existing applications
– Too-far-out technology
– Resistance from in-house analytic groups
 First hits
• Small information-based companies who
provided data in exchange for free results
• CIO who wanted to be seen as the
technology pioneer in his industry
• CIO who wanted the success story to
feature in the company’s annual report
Led to the formation of a group offering services using Quest
 Characteristics of engagements
• Mostly associations and sequential patterns
• Completeness a big plus
• Unanticipated uses
• Feedback for further development
 Into the product land
• Formation of a small “out-of-plan” product
group to productize Quest
• Facilitated by a closet mathematician
• Successes of the services group used for
market validation
• Continued development and infusion of
technology
 Intelligent Miner
• Serious product
• Integrates technologies from various groups
• Fast, scalable, runs on multiple platforms
• Several “early market” success
stories

http://www.software.ibm.com/data/iminer/
 Are we in the chasm?
• Perceived to be sophisticated technology,
usable only by specialists
• Long, expensive projects
• Stand-alone, loosely-coupled with data
infrastructures
• Difficult to infuse into existing mission-
critical applications
 Chasm Crossing
• Personal speculations on some technical
challenges
• Do not imply IBM research/product
directions
XML-based Data Mining Standard (1)

• Model Building:
Data Specs Standard
DTD – A pair of standard
Parameters
DTDs for each
operation
Operator Library – Interchangeable
library of operator
implementations
Standard
Model
DTD
Ack: Mattos, Pirahesh, Schwenkries
 XML-based Data Mining Standard (2)
Standard DTDs • Model Deployment:
Model Mapping Data – Mapping XML object
Record provides mapping
between names and
format in the model
Application Library object and the data record
– Model could have been
developed on a different
Standard system
Result
DTD
 Implications
• Standard interfaces for application
developers to incorporate data mining
• Coupling with relational databases
– mappings from DTDs to relational schemas
– implementation using existing infrastructure
 Data Mining Benchmarks
• UC Irvine repository
• Generating synthetic benchmarks modeled
after real data sets is a hard problem
– How to map names into meaningful literals
– How to preserve empirical distributions

Ack: Srikant, Ullman

 Auto-focus data mining
• Automatic parameter tuning
• Automatic algorithm selection (à la join
method selection in database query
optimization)

Ack: Andreas Arning

 Web: Greatest opportunity
• Huge collection of data (e.g. Yahoo
collecting ~50GB every day)
• Universal digital distribution medium
makes data mining results actionable in
fundamentally new ways
• But watch for privacy pitfall
 Privacy-preserving data mining
• Technical vs. legislated solutions
• Implication for data mining algorithms
when some fields of a data record have
been fudged according to the user’s privacy
sensitivity

Ack: R. Srikant
 Personalization
• Internet might provide for the first time tools
necessary for users to capture information
about themselves and to selectively release
this information†
• Will we be providing these tools?

† John Hagel, Marc Singer. Net Worth. Harvard Business School Press .
 What about Association Rules?
• Very long patterns
• Separating wheat from chaff
• Principled introduction of domain
knowledge
 What else?
• Formal foundations of data mining
 Summary
• Closely couple data • Standard interfaces
mining with database • Benchmarks
systems • Auto focussing
• Embed data mining
into applications

• Personalization
• Focus on web
• Privacy
 Concluding remarks
• Data mining, a great technology
– Combination of intriguing theoretical questions
with large commercial interest in the
technology
• Poised for transitioning into mainstream
technology
• Will we rise to the challenge as a
community?
 Acknowledgments
Arning Arnold Bayardo Baur Bollinger Brodbeck
Baune Carey Chandra Cody Faloutsos Gardner
Gehrke Ghosh Greissl Gruhl Grove Gunopulos

Gupta Haas Ho Imielinski Iyer Lent

Leyman Lin Lingenfelder Mason McPherson Megiddo

Mehta Miranda Psaila Raghavan Rissanen Sawhney

Sarawagi Schwenkries Schkolnick Shafer Shim Somani
Srikant Staub Swami Traiger Vu Zait