Optimization for Active Learning-based Interactive Database Exploration

There is an increasing gap between fast growth of data and limited human ability to comprehend data. Consequently, there has been a growing demand of data management tools that can bridge this gap and help the user retrieve high value content from data more effectively. In this work, we aim to build interactive data exploration as a new database service, using an approach called "explore-by-example". In particular, we cast the explore-by-example problem in a principled "active learning" framework, and bring the properties of important classes of database queries to bear on the design of new algorithms and optimizations for active learning-based database exploration. These new techniques allow the database system to overcome a fundamental limitation of traditional active learning, i.e., the slow convergence problem. Evaluation results using real-world datasets and user interest patterns show that our new system significantly outperforms state-of-the-art active learning techniques and data exploration systems in accuracy while achieving desired efficiency for interactive performance.