Turning Clusters into Patterns: Rectangle-Based Discriminative Data Description

Abstract

The ultimate goal of data mining is to extract knowledge from massive data. Knowledge is ideally represented as human-comprehensible patterns from which end-users can gain intuitions and insights. Yet not all data mining methods produce such readily understandable knowledge, e.g., most clustering algorithms output sets of points as clusters. In this paper, we perform a systematic study of cluster description that generates interpretable patterns from clusters. We introduce and analyze novel description formats leading to more expressive power, motivate and define novel description problems specifying different trade-offs between interpretability and accuracy. We also present effective heuristic algorithms together with their empirical evaluations.