Lightweight Knowledge Representations for Automating Data Analysis

Abstract

The principal goal of data science is to derive meaningful information from data. To do this, data scientists develop a space of analytic possibilities and from it reach their information goals by using their knowledge of the domain, the available data, the operations that can be performed on those data, the algorithms/models that are fed the data, and how all of these facets interweave. In this work, we take the first steps towards automating a key aspect of the data science pipeline: data analysis. We present an extensible taxonomy of data analytic operations that scopes across domains and data, as well as a method for codifying domain-specific knowledge that links this analytics taxonomy to actual data. We validate the functionality of our analytics taxonomy by implementing a system that leverages it, alongside domain labelings for 8 distinct domains, to automatically generate a space of answerable questions and associated analytic plans. In this way, we produce information spaces over data that enable complex analyses and search over this data and pave the way for fully automated data analysis.