Patent ID: 7574454

Claim:
An interactive data mining method comprises the steps of: a) Inputting a presentable knowledge model into a computer for data mining, the presentable knowledge model being a modified regulation tree deriving and adding additional statistics at each node, the additional statistics including contrast examples for each terminal node and associated feature distribution profiles for each non-terminal node of the modified regulation tree; b) Performing rule viewing of a terminal node in the presentable knowledge model by a parallel coordinate visualization technique that maps a multiple dimensional space onto two display dimensions and at least one data item is presented as a polygonal line wherein path from root node through non-terminal nodes toward a terminal node is presented and weight of a sample is highlighted by the thickness of the line; c) the rule viewing step further highlighting samples having representative feature values from correct label and wrong label, samples from correct label and wrong label being sorted according to their closeness or similarity to the representative feature values and the contrast examples are selected as high rank samples from both correct label and wrong label population; and d) performing data mining using multi-level abstraction including an overview mode, a zoom and filter mode and a details-on-demand mode and the multi-level abstraction further comprising the steps of: a) creating a regulation tree as a baseline knowledge model; b) in the over view mode, using a shallower tree that could be created by pruning the tree or simply limiting the depth of the tree and combining all nodes beyond a depth limit; c) in the zoom and filter mode, allowing certain branches of the tree to expand following user direction; and d) in the details-on-demand mode, showing the deepest branch of the tree that corresponds to human interest.