Opportunity map
Kaidi Zhao, Bing Liu, Thomas M. Tirpak, Weimin Xiao · 2005
Data mining techniques frequently find a large number of patterns or rules, which make it very difficult for a human analyst to interpret the results and to find the truly interesting and actionable rules. Due to the subjective nature of "interestingness", human involvement in the analysis process is crucial. In this paper, we propose a novel visual data mining framework for the purpose of identifying actionable knowledge quickly and easily from discovered rules and data. This framework is called the Opportunity Map. It is inspired by some interesting ideas from Quality Engineering, in particular Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and the House of Quality. It associates summarized data or discovered rules with the application objective using an interactive matrix, which enables the user to quickly identify where the opportunities are. The proposed system can be used to visually analyze discovered rules, and other statistical properties of the data. The user can also interactively group actionable attributes and values, and see how they affect the targets of interest. Combined with drill-down and comparative analysis, the user can analyze rules and data at different levels of detail. The proposed visualization framework thus represents a systematic and yet flexible method of rule analysis. Applications of the system to large-scale data sets from our industrial partner have yielded promising results.