Data Mining with Background Knowledge from the Web

Many data mining problems can be solved better if more background knowledge is added: predictive models can become more accurate, and descriptive models can reveal more interesting findings. However, collecting and integrating background knowledge is tedious manual work. In this paper, we introduce the RapidMiner Linked Open Data Extension, which can extend a dataset at hand with additional attributes drawn from the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud, a large collection of publicly available datasets on various topics. The extension contains operators for linking local data to open data in the LOD cloud, and for augmenting it with additional attributes. In a case study, we show that the prediction error of car fuel consumption can be reduced by 50% by adding additional attributes, e.g., describing the automobile layout and the car body configuration, from Linked Open Data.