| Abstract |
Finding subsets of a dataset that somehow deviate from the norm, i.e. where something interesting is going on, is a classical Data Mining task. In traditional local pattern mining methods, such deviations are measured in terms of a relatively high occurrence (frequent itemset mining), or an unusual distribution for one designated target attribute (subgroup discovery). These, however, do not encompass all forms of "interesting". To capture a more general notion of interestingness in subsets of a dataset, we develop Exceptional Model Mining (EMM). This is a supervised local pattern mining framework, where several target attributes are selected, and a model over these attributes is chosen to be the target concept. Then, subsets are sought on which this model is substantially different from the model on the whole dataset. For instance, we can find parts of the data where two target attributes have an unusual correlation, a classifier has a deviating predictive performance, or a Bayesian network fitted on several target attributes has an exceptional structure. We will discuss some real-world applications of EMM instances, including using the Bayesian network model to identify meteorological conditions under which food chains are displaced, and using a regression model to find the subset of households in the Chinese province of Hunan that do not follow the general economic law of demand.
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