AIS Travel Support for the Data Representation Discovery Workshop to be held on August 12-17, 2007 in Orlando, FL

Clopinet, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

Proposal Number: ECS-0736687 Proposal Title: AIS Travel Support for the Data Representation Discovery Workshop PI Name: Guyon, Isabelle PI Institution: Clopinet This grant will fund the travel of five students to participate in the next Data Representation Discovery Workshop. The objective of the workshop is to evaluate the added value of domain expertise in the design of efficient predictive models. In the framework of data mining and machine learning, predictive models are built from training examples to make predictions of given outcomes, e.g. the health status of a patient in medical diagnosis, or the sales projections in marketing. The approach taken is to organize a challenge in which the participants competed on five datasets from various application domains (marketing, handwriting recognition, drug discovery, text categorization, and ecology). The data are made available both in their "raw" representation and as feature vectors. For instance, in the drug discovery domain, the task is to predict the activity of given compounds against the HIV virus; the chemical formulas have been provided as raw data and coefficients quantifying physico-chemical molecular properties formed the feature representation. The outcomes of this challenge ending August 1st, 2007 http://clopinet.com/isabelle/Projects/agnostic/ will be analyzed and discussed at the workshop. Intellectual merit: Determining the effectiveness of incorporating domain knowledge vs. using off-the-shelf modeling software, both in terms of time to market delivery of models and gain in prediction performance, is essential to the Industry, yet no obvious to quantify. Broader impacts: Several students distinguished themselves in the competition. The workshop will help disseminating their results and software (and those of other researchers) and lay the basis of collaborations between them. The workshop will also serve as a platform to plan for future challenge events and involve students in that process.