Visual, Interactive Data Mining with InfoZoom – the Financial Data Set

This paper describes the application of the data analysis tool InfoZoom to the Financial Data Set for the PKKD’99 Discovery Challenge. No automatic method for data mining is used. Instead, InfoZoom enables the user to interactively explore different visualizations of the data. In this way, the user gets a feeling of the data, detects interesting knowledge, and gains a deep understanding of the data set. Introduction InfoZoom has been developed at GMD – the German National Research Center for Information Technology. It is now marketed by the GMD spin-off company humanIT. InfoZoom displays database relations as tables with attributes as rows and objects as columns. In Figure 1 each column corresponds to a bank account with a granted loan. The attributes are hierarchically ordered like files in a directory. The menu left of each attribute name shows the possible values and their frequency. Selecting a value from the menu restricts the table to the objects with this value. Clicking on the arrow outline right of an attribute sorts the table by this attribute. A table can be compressed by clicking the second of the three mode buttons in the upper left corner of the table (above „682 of 682 objects“). In Compressed Mode, the column width is reduced until all the objects Figure 1: Wide Table Mode Figure 2: Compressed Table Mode Contribution to the „Discovery Challenge” at the 3rd European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, PKDD ‘99, September 15-18, 1999, Prague, Czech Republic