Improving maintenance strategies from experience feedback

A huge amount of rough data is available in companies on past maintenance activities as a result of the implementation of CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System). In that context, we focus on an experience feedback system dedicated to maintenance, allowing the capitalization of past interventions by means of a formal knowledge representation language, and the extraction from these interventions of new knowledge for future reuse

An interactive approach for the post-processing in a KDD process

Association rule mining is a technique widely used in the field of data mining, which consists in discovering relationships and/or correlations between the attributes of a database. However, the method brings known problems among which the fact that a large number of association rules may be extracted, not all of them being relevant or interesting for the domain expert. In that context, we propose a practical, interactive and helpful guided approach to visualize, evaluate and compare the extracted rules following a step by step methodology, taking into account the interaction between the industrial domain expert and the data mining expert

Generating Knowledge in Maintenance from Experience Feedback

Knowledge is nowadays considered as a significant source of performance improvement, but may be difficult to identify, structure, analyse and reuse properly. A possible source of knowledge is in the data and information stored in various modules of industrial information systems, like CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management Systems) for maintenance. In that context, the main objective of this paper is to propose a framework allowing to manage and generate knowledge from information on past experiences, for improving the decisions related to the maintenance activity. In that purpose, we suggest an original Experience Feedback process dedicated to maintenance, allowing to capitalize on past interventions by i) formalizing the domain knowledge and experiences using a visual knowledge representation formalism with logical foundation (Conceptual Graphs); ii) extracting new knowledge thanks to association rules mining algorithms, using an innovative interactive approach; iii) interpreting and evaluating this new knowledge thanks to the reasoning operations of Conceptual Graphs. The suggested method is illustrated on a case study based on real data dealing with the maintenance of overhead cranes

Exploiting semantic web knowledge graphs in data mining

Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) is a research field concerned with deriving higher-level insights from data. The tasks performed in that field are knowledge intensive and can often benefit from using additional knowledge from various sources. Therefore, many approaches have been proposed in this area that combine Semantic Web data with the data mining and knowledge discovery process. Semantic Web knowledge graphs are a backbone of many information systems that require access to structured knowledge. Such knowledge graphs contain factual knowledge about real word entities and the relations between them, which can be utilized in various natural language processing, information retrieval, and any data mining applications. Following the principles of the Semantic Web, Semantic Web knowledge graphs are publicly available as Linked Open Data. Linked Open Data is an open, interlinked collection of datasets in machine-interpretable form, covering most of the real world domains. In this thesis, we investigate the hypothesis if Semantic Web knowledge graphs can be exploited as background knowledge in different steps of the knowledge discovery process, and different data mining tasks. More precisely, we aim to show that Semantic Web knowledge graphs can be utilized for generating valuable data mining features that can be used in various data mining tasks. Identifying, collecting and integrating useful background knowledge for a given data mining application can be a tedious and time consuming task. Furthermore, most data mining tools require features in propositional form, i.e., binary, nominal or numerical features associated with an instance, while Linked Open Data sources are usually graphs by nature. Therefore, in Part I, we evaluate unsupervised feature generation strategies from types and relations in knowledge graphs, which are used in different data mining tasks, i.e., classification, regression, and outlier detection. As the number of generated features grows rapidly with the number of instances in the dataset, we provide a strategy for feature selection in hierarchical feature space, in order to select only the most informative and most representative features for a given dataset. Furthermore, we provide an end-to-end tool for mining the Web of Linked Data, which provides functionalities for each step of the knowledge discovery process, i.e., linking local data to a Semantic Web knowledge graph, integrating features from multiple knowledge graphs, feature generation and selection, and building machine learning models. However, we show that such feature generation strategies often lead to high dimensional feature vectors even after dimensionality reduction, and also, the reusability of such feature vectors across different datasets is limited. In Part II, we propose an approach that circumvents the shortcomings introduced with the approaches in Part I. More precisely, we develop an approach that is able to embed complete Semantic Web knowledge graphs in a low dimensional feature space, where each entity and relation in the knowledge graph is represented as a numerical vector. Projecting such latent representations of entities into a lower dimensional feature space shows that semantically similar entities appear closer to each other. We use several Semantic Web knowledge graphs to show that such latent representation of entities have high relevance for different data mining tasks. Furthermore, we show that such features can be easily reused for different datasets and different tasks. In Part III, we describe a list of applications that exploit Semantic Web knowledge graphs, besides the standard data mining tasks, like classification and regression. We show that the approaches developed in Part I and Part II can be used in applications in various domains. More precisely, we show that Semantic Web graphs can be exploited for analyzing statistics, building recommender systems, entity and document modeling, and taxonomy induction. %In Part III, we focus on semantic annotations in HTML pages, which are another realization of the Semantic Web vision. Semantic annotations are integrated into the code of HTML pages using markup languages, like Microformats, RDFa, and Microdata. While such data covers various domains and topics, and can be useful for developing various data mining applications, additional steps of cleaning and integrating the data need to be performed. In this thesis, we describe a set of approaches for processing long literals and images extracted from semantic annotations in HTML pages. We showcase the approaches in the e-commerce domain. Such approaches contribute in building and consuming Semantic Web knowledge graphs

Association Rule Interactive Post-processing using Rule Schemas and Ontologies - ARIPSO

This thesis is concerned with the merging of two active research domains: Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD), more precisely the Association Rule Mining technique, and Knowledge Engineering (KE) with a main interest in knowledge representation languages developed around the Semantic Web. In Data Mining, the usefulness of association rule technique is strongly limited by the huge amount and the low quality of delivered rules. Experiments show that rules become almost impossible to use when their number exceeds 100. At the same time, nuggets are often represented by those rare (low support) unexpected association rules which are surprising to the user. Unfortunately, the lower the support is, the larger the volume of rules becomes. Thus, it is crucial to help the decision maker with an efficient technique to reduce the number of rules. To overcome this drawback, several methods have been proposed in the literature such as itemset concise representations, redundancy reduction, filtering, ranking and post-processing. Even though rule interestingness strongly depends on user knowledge and goals, most of the existing methods are generally based on data structure. For instance, if the user looks for unexpected rules, all the already known rules should be pruned. Or, if the user wants to focus on specific family of rules, only this subset of rules should be selected. In this context, we address two main issues: the integration of user knowledge in the discovery process and the interactivity with the user. The first issue requires defining an adapted formalism to express user knowledge with accuracy and flexibility such as ontologies in the Semantic Web. Second, the interactivity with the user allows a more iterative mining process where the user can successively test different hypotheses or preferences and focus on interesting rules. The main contributions of this work can be summarized as follows: (i) A model to represent user knowledge. First, we propose a new rule-like formalism, called Rule Schema, which allows the user to define his/her expectations regarding the rules through ontology concepts. Second, ontologies allow the user to express his/her domain knowledge by means of a high semantic model. Last, the user can choose among a set of Operators for interactive processing the one to be applied over each Rule Schema (i.e. pruning, conforming, unexpectedness, . . . ). (ii) A new post-processing approach, called ARIPSO (Association Rule Interactive Post-processing using rule Schemas and Ontologies), which helps the user to reduce the volume of the discovered rules and to improve their quality. It consists in an interactive process integrating user knowledge and expectations by means of the proposed model. At each step of ARIPSO, the interactive loop allows the user to change the provided information and to reiterate the post-processing phase which produces new results. (iii) The implementation in post-processing of the proposed approach. The developed tool is complete and operational, and it implements all the functionalities described in the approach. Also, it makes the connection between different elements like the set of rules and rule schemas stored in PMML/XML files, and the ontologies stored in OWL files and inferred by the Pellet reasoner. (iv) An adapted implementation without post-processing, called ARLIUS (Association Rule Local mining Interactive Using rule Schemas), consisting in an interactive local mining process guided by the user. It allows the user to focus on interesting rules without the necessity to extract all of them, and without minimum support limit. In this way, the user may explore the rule space incrementally, a small amount at each step, starting from his/her own expectations and discovering their related rules. (v) The experimental study analyzing the approach efficiency and the discovered rule quality. For this purpose, we used a real-life and large questionnaire database concerning customer satisfaction. For ARIPSO, the experimentation was carried out in complete cooperation with the domain expert. For different scenarios, from an input set of nearly 400 thousand association rules, ARIPSO filtered between 3 and 200 rules validated by the expert. Clearly, ARIPSO allows the user to significantly and efficiently reduce the input rule set. For ARLIUS, we experimented different scenarios over the same questionnaire database and we obtained reduced sets of rules (less than 100) with very low support

Génération de connaissances à l’aide du retour d’expérience : application à la maintenance industrielle

Les travaux de recherche présentés dans ce mémoire s’inscrivent dans le cadre de la valorisation des connaissances issues des expériences passées afin d’améliorer les performances des processus industriels. La connaissance est considérée aujourd'hui comme une ressource stratégique importante pouvant apporter un avantage concurrentiel décisif aux organisations. La gestion des connaissances (et en particulier le retour d’expérience) permet de préserver et de valoriser des informations liées aux activités d’une entreprise afin d’aider la prise de décision et de créer de nouvelles connaissances à partir du patrimoine immatériel de l’organisation. Dans ce contexte, les progrès des technologies de l’information et de la communication jouent un rôle essentiel dans la collecte et la gestion des connaissances. L’implémentation généralisée des systèmes d’information industriels, tels que les ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), rend en effet disponible un grand volume d’informations issues des événements ou des faits passés, dont la réutilisation devient un enjeu majeur. Toutefois, ces fragments de connaissances (les expériences passées) sont très contextualisés et nécessitent des méthodologies bien précises pour être généralisés. Etant donné le potentiel des informations recueillies dans les entreprises en tant que source de nouvelles connaissances, nous proposons dans ce travail une démarche originale permettant de générer de nouvelles connaissances tirées de l’analyse des expériences passées, en nous appuyant sur la complémentarité de deux courants scientifiques : la démarche de Retour d’Expérience (REx) et les techniques d’Extraction de Connaissances à partir de Données (ECD). Le couplage REx-ECD proposé porte principalement sur : i) la modélisation des expériences recueillies à l’aide d’un formalisme de représentation de connaissances afin de faciliter leur future exploitation, et ii) l’application de techniques relatives à la fouille de données (ou data mining) afin d’extraire des expériences de nouvelles connaissances sous la forme de règles. Ces règles doivent nécessairement être évaluées et validées par les experts du domaine avant leur réutilisation et/ou leur intégration dans le système industriel. Tout au long de cette démarche, nous avons donné une place privilégiée aux Graphes Conceptuels (GCs), formalisme de représentation des connaissances choisi pour faciliter le stockage, le traitement et la compréhension des connaissances extraites par l’utilisateur, en vue d’une exploitation future. Ce mémoire s’articule en quatre chapitres. Le premier constitue un état de l’art abordant les généralités des deux courants scientifiques qui contribuent à notre proposition : le REx et les techniques d’ECD. Le second chapitre présente la démarche REx-ECD proposée, ainsi que les outils mis en œuvre pour la génération de nouvelles connaissances afin de valoriser les informations disponibles décrivant les expériences passées. Le troisième chapitre présente une méthodologie structurée pour interpréter et évaluer l’intérêt des connaissances extraites lors de la phase de post-traitement du processus d’ECD. Finalement, le dernier chapitre expose des cas réels d’application de la démarche proposée à des interventions de maintenance industrielle

Génération de connaissances à l’aide du retour d’expérience : application à la maintenance industrielle

Les travaux de recherche présentés dans ce mémoire s’inscrivent dans le cadre de la valorisation des connaissances issues des expériences passées afin d’améliorer les performances des processus industriels. La connaissance est considérée aujourd'hui comme une ressource stratégique importante pouvant apporter un avantage concurrentiel décisif aux organisations. La gestion des connaissances (et en particulier le retour d’expérience) permet de préserver et de valoriser des informations liées aux activités d’une entreprise afin d’aider la prise de décision et de créer de nouvelles connaissances à partir du patrimoine immatériel de l’organisation. Dans ce contexte, les progrès des technologies de l’information et de la communication jouent un rôle essentiel dans la collecte et la gestion des connaissances. L’implémentation généralisée des systèmes d’information industriels, tels que les ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), rend en effet disponible un grand volume d’informations issues des événements ou des faits passés, dont la réutilisation devient un enjeu majeur. Toutefois, ces fragments de connaissances (les expériences passées) sont très contextualisés et nécessitent des méthodologies bien précises pour être généralisés. Etant donné le potentiel des informations recueillies dans les entreprises en tant que source de nouvelles connaissances, nous proposons dans ce travail une démarche originale permettant de générer de nouvelles connaissances tirées de l’analyse des expériences passées, en nous appuyant sur la complémentarité de deux courants scientifiques : la démarche de Retour d’Expérience (REx) et les techniques d’Extraction de Connaissances à partir de Données (ECD). Le couplage REx-ECD proposé porte principalement sur : i) la modélisation des expériences recueillies à l’aide d’un formalisme de représentation de connaissances afin de faciliter leur future exploitation, et ii) l’application de techniques relatives à la fouille de données (ou data mining) afin d’extraire des expériences de nouvelles connaissances sous la forme de règles. Ces règles doivent nécessairement être évaluées et validées par les experts du domaine avant leur réutilisation et/ou leur intégration dans le système industriel. Tout au long de cette démarche, nous avons donné une place privilégiée aux Graphes Conceptuels (GCs), formalisme de représentation des connaissances choisi pour faciliter le stockage, le traitement et la compréhension des connaissances extraites par l’utilisateur, en vue d’une exploitation future. Ce mémoire s’articule en quatre chapitres. Le premier constitue un état de l’art abordant les généralités des deux courants scientifiques qui contribuent à notre proposition : le REx et les techniques d’ECD. Le second chapitre présente la démarche REx-ECD proposée, ainsi que les outils mis en œuvre pour la génération de nouvelles connaissances afin de valoriser les informations disponibles décrivant les expériences passées. Le troisième chapitre présente une méthodologie structurée pour interpréter et évaluer l’intérêt des connaissances extraites lors de la phase de post-traitement du processus d’ECD. Finalement, le dernier chapitre expose des cas réels d’application de la démarche proposée à des interventions de maintenance industrielle. ABSTRACT : The research work presented in this thesis relates to knowledge extraction from past experiences in order to improve the performance of industrial process. Knowledge is nowadays considered as an important strategic resource providing a decisive competitive advantage to organizations. Knowledge management (especially the experience feedback) is used to preserve and enhance the information related to a company’s activities in order to support decision-making and create new knowledge from the intangible heritage of the organization. In that context, advances in information and communication technologies play an essential role for gathering and processing knowledge. The generalised implementation of industrial information systems such as ERPs (Enterprise Resource Planning) make available a large amount of data related to past events or historical facts, which reuse is becoming a major issue. However, these fragments of knowledge (past experiences) are highly contextualized and require specific methodologies for being generalized. Taking into account the great potential of the information collected in companies as a source of new knowledge, we suggest in this work an original approach to generate new knowledge based on the analysis of past experiences, taking into account the complementarity of two scientific threads: Experience Feedback (EF) and Knowledge Discovery techniques from Databases (KDD). The suggested EF-KDD combination focuses mainly on: i) modelling the experiences collected using a knowledge representation formalism in order to facilitate their future exploitation, and ii) applying techniques related to data mining in order to extract new knowledge in the form of rules. These rules must necessarily be evaluated and validated by experts of the industrial domain before their reuse and/or integration into the industrial system. Throughout this approach, we have given a privileged position to Conceptual Graphs (CGs), knowledge representation formalism chosen in order to facilitate the storage, processing and understanding of the extracted knowledge by the user for future exploitation. This thesis is divided into four chapters. The first chapter is a state of the art addressing the generalities of the two scientific threads that contribute to our proposal: EF and KDD. The second chapter presents the EF-KDD suggested approach and the tools used for the generation of new knowledge, in order to exploit the available information describing past experiences. The third chapter suggests a structured methodology for interpreting and evaluating the usefulness of the extracted knowledge during the post-processing phase in the KDD process. Finally, the last chapter discusses real case studies dealing with the industrial maintenance domain, on which the proposed approach has been applied