FlexiMine - A Flexible Platform for KDD Research and Application Development

FlexiMine is a KDD system designed as a testbed for data-mining research, as well as a generic knowledge discovery tool for varied database domains. Flexibility is achieved by an open-ended design that enables integration of existing data-mining algorithms, new locally developed algorithms, and utility functions such as visualization and preprocessing. The system interfaces an INFORMIX database server via SQL queries and thus support for new databases is simple and clean. With a view of serving remote, as well as local, users, internet availability was a design goal. Fleximine is implemented in Java and hence we can run the user-end of the system either as a Java applications or (with some limitations on the user) as a Java applet. This paper reviews the architecture, design and operation of FlexiMine and presents new ideas incorporated in the data-mining algorithms (Association rules, Decision trees, Bayesian knowledge-bases and Meta-queries). Keywords: Knowledge Discovery in Databas..