Semantic translation for rule-based knowledge in data mining

Abstract

Considering data size and privacy concerns in a distributed setting, it is neither desirable nor feasible to translate data from one resource to another in data mining. Rather, it makes more sense to first mine knowledge from one data resource and then translate the discovered knowledge (models) to another for knowledge reuse. Although there have been successful research efforts in knowledge transfer, the knowledge translation problem in the semantically heterogenous scenario has not been addressed adequately. In this paper, we first propose to use Semantic Web ontologies to represent rule-based knowledge to make the knowledge computer "translatable". Instead of an inductive learning approach, we treat knowledge translation as a deductive inference. We elaborate a translation method with both the forward and backward chaining to address the asymmetry of translation. We show the effectiveness of our knowledge translation method in decision tree rules and association rules mined from sports and gene data respectively. In a more general context, this work illustrates the promise of a novel research which leverages ontologies and Semantic Web techniques to extend the knowledge transfer in data mining to the semantically heterogeneous scenario. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.