This document summarizes Michał Łopuszyński's presentation on using an agile approach based on the CRISP-DM methodology for data mining projects. It discusses the key phases of CRISP-DM including business understanding, data understanding, data preparation, modelling, evaluation, and deployment. For each phase, it provides examples of best practices and challenges, with an emphasis on spending sufficient time on data understanding and preparation, developing models with the deployment context in mind, and carefully evaluating results against business objectives.

1. CRISP-DM
Agile Approach to Data Mining Projects
Michał Łopuszyński
Warsaw Data Science Meetup, 2016.06.07

2. About me
I work at ICM UW•
Our group = Applied Data Analysis Lab•
Supercomputing centre, weather forecast , virtual library,
open science platform, visualization solutions, ...
•
Involved in modelling and data analysis projects from cosmology, medicine,
bioinformatics, quantum chemistry, biophysics, fluid dynamics, materials
science, social network analysis ...
•
Automatic information extraction from PDFs•
Text-mining in scientific literature•
Variety of application projects (analysis of court judgments, aviation,
deploying solutions on the big data stack Spark/Hadoop, trainings)
•
About me
adalab.icm.edu.pl

3. What is CRISP-DM?
Cross Industry Standard Process
for Data Mining
•
SPSS, Teradata, Daimler, OCHRA, NCR
Developed in 1996 by big players
in data analysis
•
•
I follow "CRISP-DM 1.0 Step-by-step data mining guide"•
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DATA
Business
Understanding
Data
Understanding
Data
Preparation
Modelling
Evaluation
Deployment
Most popular methodology
for data-centric projects
See KDNuggets Polls•
Runner-up SEMMA•
I find it agile•
Introduces almost no overhead•
Emphasizes adaptive transitions
between project phases
•
2007, 2014

4. Business Understanding
Determine business objectives•
Resources (data!), risks, costs & benefits
Assess situation•
Ideally with quantitative success criteria
Determine data mining goals•
Estimate time line, budget, but also tools and
techniques
Develop project plan•
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DATA
Business
Understanding
Data
Understanding
Data
Preparation
Modelling
Evaluation
Deployment

5. Business Understanding
Difficult!•
Often, you have to enter a new field•
You have to explain data science
limitations to non-experts
•
Source: http://xkcd.com/1425
No, performance will not be 100%•
We need much more data to train
an accurate model
•
For tomorrow, it is impossible•

6. Business Understanding – my DOs and DON'Ts
Have a lot of patience for vaguely defined problems•
Do not waste your time on ill-defined, unrealistic projects•
Learn to concretize or even reduce the scope of the initial idea•
Data sample•
Real-life use cases•
Quantitative success metrics•

7. Data Understanding
Collect initial data•
Persist results
Describe data•
Persist results
Explore data•
Carefully document problems and issues found!
Verify data quality•
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Modelling
Evaluation
Deployment

8. Data Understanding – Validate Everything
<judgement id="...">
<date>3013-12-04 00:00:00.0 CET</date>
<publicationDate>2014-07-23 02:52:17.0 CEST</publicationDate>
<courtId>15250000</courtId>
<departmentId>503</departmentId>
<chairman>Małgorzata ...</chairman>
<judges>
<judge>Małgorzata ...</judge>
</judges>
...
</judgement>
<judgement id="...">
<date>2012-10-01 00:00:00.0 CEST</date>
<publicationDate>2014-12-31 18:15:05.0 CET</publicationDate>
<courtId>15450500</courtId>
<departmentId>6027</departmentId>
<judges>
<judge>Piotr ...</judge>
<judge>wskazał</judge>
<judge>czego wymaga art. 17a ust. 2 ustawy</judge>
...
</judges>
</judgement>

9. Data Understanding – Spot Anomalies
Histogram of certain smooth quantity measured using "precise equipment"
Explanation – effect of human interface between precise equipment & db

10. Data Understanding – Spot Anomalies
Secondary school examination (Matura) score distribution from Polish
Exploratory data analysis can reveal imperfections of conducted
experiment
Source: CKE Materials, Matura 2012

11. Data Understanding – my DOs and DON'Ts
Do not trust data quality estimates provided by your customer•
Verify as far as you can, if your data is correct, complete, coherent,
deduplicated, representative, independent, up-to-date, stationary
•
Understand anomalies and outliers•
Do not economize on this phase•
The earlier you discover issues with your data the better (yes, your data will
have issues!)
•
Data understanding leads to domain understanding, it will pay off in
the modelling phase
•
Investigate what sort of processing was applied to the raw data•

12. Data Preparation
Select data•
Clean data•
Generate derived attributes
Construct data•
Merge information from different sources
Integrate data•
Convert to format convenient for modelling
Format data•
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Preparation
Modelling
Evaluation
Deployment

13. Data Preparation
Tedious!•
Make, Drake
Use workflow tools to document, automate & parallelize data prep.•
classification-jsonl
data-aux/class-riffle
data-clean/joind-jsonl
data-aux/metad-riffle data-aux/priis-json data-aux/prinf-json
stat/basic stat/basic-fp7 stat/collab
metadata-jsonl projects-from-iis-jsonl projects-from-infspace-jsonlmetadata-extracted-jsonl
Oozie, Azkaban, Luigi, Airflow, ...

14. Data Preparation
Data understanding and preparation will usually consume half or
more of your project time!
•
20% 20%
14%
10% 10%10%
What % of time in your data mining project(s) is
spent on data cleaning and preparation?
8%
4%
25%
25%
39%
Percentage of responses
Percentageoftime
Source: M.A.Munson, A Study on the Importance of
and Time Spent Different Modeling Steps,
ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter
13, 65-71 (2011)
Source: KDNuggets Poll 2003

15. Data Preparation – my DOs and DON'Ts
Use workflow tools to help you with the above•
Prepare your customer that data understanding and preparation
take considerable amount of time
•
Automate this phase as far as possible•
When merging multiple sources, track provenance of your data•

16. Modelling
Generate test design•
Feature eng., optimize model parameters
Build model•
Iterate the above
Assess model•
Assumptions, measure of accuracy
Select modelling technique•
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17. Modelling – Tooling Selection
Where your model will be deployed?•
Do you need to distribute your
computations? (avoid!)
•
Breadth = performance, lots of general
purpose libraries and tooling, easy creation
of web services
Should I use general purpose language?•
C++
Java
C#
R
Matlab
Mathematica
Python
Scala
ClojureF#
BreadthDepth
(quality of general purpose tooling)
(qualityofdataanalysistooling)
Depth = easy data manipulation, latest
models and statistical techniques available
Should I use data analysis language?•
Can I afford a prototype?•

18. Modelling – my DOs and DON'Ts
Develop your model with deployment conditions in mind•
Allocate time for hyperparameter optimization•
• Whenever possible, peek inside your model and consult it with
domain expert
Assess feature importance•
Run your model on simulated data•
Be creative with your features (feature engineering)•
Esp. from textual data or time-series you can generate a lot of std. features•
Make conscious decision about missing data (NAs) and outliers (regression!)•

19. Evaluation
Review process•
To deploy or not to deploy?
Determine next steps• Determine next steps
Business success criteria fulfilled?
Evaluate results•
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20. Evaluation – my DOs and DON'Ts
Work with the performance criteria dictated by your customer's
business model
•
Assess not only performance, but also practical aspects, related to
deployment, for example:
•
Training and prediction speed•
Robustness and maintainability
(tooling, dependence on other subsystems, library vs. homegrown code)
•
Watch out for data leakage, for example:•
Time series – mixing past and future•
Meaningful identifiers•
Other nasty ways of artificially introducing extra information, not available
in production
•

21. Deployment
Plan monitoring and maintenance•
Produce final report•
Plan deployment•
Collect lessons learned!
Review project•
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Understanding
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Modelling
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22. Deployment – my DOs and DON'Ts
Read this paper, for excellent insights!

23. Thank you!
Questions?
@lopusz