Cooperative Learning and Virtual Reality-Based Visualization for Data Mining

Abstract

Data mining concerns the discovery and extraction of knowledge chunks from large data repositories. In a cooperative datamining environment, more than one data mining tool collaborates during the knowledge discovery process. This chapter describes a data mining approach used to visualize the cooperative data mining process. According to this approach, visual data mining consists of both data and knowledge visualization. First, the data are visualized during both data preprocessing and data mining. In this way, the quality of the data is assessed and improved throughout the knowledge discovery process. Second, the knowledge, as discovered by the individual learners, is assessed and modified through the interactive visualization of the cooperative data mining process and its results. The knowledge obtained from the human domain expert also forms part of the process. Finally, the use of virtual reality-based visualization is proposed as a new method to model both the data and its descriptors.