Breaking out of the Black-Box: Research Challenges in Data Mining

Database researchers, statisticians, and \data owners" often have quite di erent views of data. In a database context the traditional goal has been to provide a general and exible data management framework, with less concern about the content of the data. Statisticians on the other hand have traditionally focused primarily on issues of data modeling and inference with relatively little concern for where the data physically reside or how the data will be accessed. Data owners, in turn, tend to be more focused on using the data as a means to an end: business data owners want to increase revenue by developing better predictive models, and scienti c data owners typically want to develop insight into the phenomena generating the data. In this brief position paper we take a broad-scale view of \what people do with their data" (the data owner's perspective) and use this viewpoint to identify current opportunities and challenges for data mining research.