Toward Representation Independent Analytics over Structured Data

Abstract

Database analytics algorithms leverage quantifiable structural properties of the data to predict interesting concepts and relationships. The same information, however, can be represented using many different structures and the structural properties observed over particular representations do not necessarily hold for alternative structures. Because these algorithms tend to be highly effective over some choices of structure, such as that of the databases used to validate them, but not so effective with others, database analytics has largely remained the province of experts who can find the desired forms for these algorithms. We argue that in order to make database analytics usable, we should use or develop algorithms that are effective over a wide range of choices of structural organizations. We introduce the notion of representation independence and empirically analyze the amount of representation independence of some popular database analytics algorithms. Our results indicate that most algorithms are not generally representation independent and find some characteristics of more representation independent heuristics.