3. The MiningMart Approach to Knowledge Discovery in Databases

Although preprocessing is one of the key issues in data analysis, it is still common practice to address this task by manually entering SQL statements and using a variety of stand-alone tools. The results are not properly documented and hardly re-usable. The MiningMart system presented in this chapter focuses on setting up and re-using best practice cases of preprocessing data stored in very large databases. A metadata model named M4 is used to declaratively define and document both, all steps of such a preprocessing chain and all the data involved. For data and applied operators there is an abstract level, understandable by human users, and an executable level, used by the metadata compiler to run cases for given data sets. An integrated environment allows for rapid development of preprocessing chains. Adaptation to different environments is supported simply by specifying all involved database entities in the target DBMS. This allows reuse of best practice cases published on the Internet. 3.