Connecting Domain Experts and Data: Enriching User-Centric Data Analysis with Neural Network-Aided Data Source Suggestion

Nowadays, data analysis is widely used in numerous areas to identify new trends, opportunities, or risks and to improve decision-making. In many cases, however, data analysis is only possible by incorporating specific domain knowledge, which is why domain experts need to be involved. To this end, data mashups are a popular tool for modeling tailored analyses. Yet, with today’s data volumes from heterogeneous source systems, it is very difficult to identify beneficial data sources, in particular for explorative data analysis. In this paper, we first define requirements aiming for user-centric analytics, followed by the introduction of SDRank, a deep-learning-based approach to identify beneficial data sources. In an extensive evaluation with three scenarios, we show that this approach offers high robustness concerning the training data used and can reliably identify beneficial data sources, even for previously unknown domains, i.e., transfer learning.