SIMILARITY SEARCH AND DATA MINING: DATABASE TECHNIQUES SUPPORTING NEXT
DECADE'S APPLICATIONS

Christian Böhm
University for Health Informatics and Technology
Innsbruck, Austria

Abstract
Similarity Search and Data Mining have become widespread problems of modern database applications involving complex objects such as Multimedia, CAD, Molecular Biology, Sequence Analysis, etc. Search problems in such databases are rarely based on exact matches but rather on some application specific notion of similarity. A common approach to grasp the intuitive idea of similarity by a formal means is to translate complex objects into multidimensional vectors by a feature transformation which allows retrieval of the most similar objects to a given query object (similarity search) but also to analyze the complete set of complex objects with respect to clusters, outliers, correlations etc. (data mining). In this contribution we identify several areas of applications where the classical feature approach is not sufficient. Example applications include Biometric Identification, Medical Imaging, Electronic Commerce and Share Price Analysis. We show that existing feature based similarity models fail due to different reasons, e.g. because they do not cope with the uncertainty which is inherent to their feature vectors (biometric identification) or because they do not integrate application specific methods into the similarity model (share price analysis, medical imaging). We survey the challenges and possible solutions to these problems to direct future research.

Biography
Christian Böhm (christian.boehm@umit.at) is working in the research fields of data mining, query processing, indexing high-dimensional data spaces, and similarity search and has extensively published in these areas. In 1994, he received his diploma degree in Computer Science at the Technische Universität München. He received his Ph.D. degree in 1998 and his habilitation degree in 2001 from the Ludwig Maximilians University Munich. Since 2002, he is associate professor of computer science and head of the Unit for Database Systems at the University for Health Informatics and Technology, Innsbruck, Austria.