Type-based categorization of relational attributes

In this work we concentrate on categorization of relational attributes based on their data type. Assuming that attribute type/characteristics are unknown or unidentifiable, we analyze and compare a variety of type-based signatures for classifying the attributes based on the semantic type of the data contained therein (e.g., router identifiers, social security numbers, email addresses). The signatures can subsequently be used for other applications as well, like clustering and index optimization/compression. This application is useful in cases where very large data collections that are generated in a distributed, ungoverned fashion end up having unknown, incomplete, inconsistent or very complex schemata and schema level meta-data. We concentrate on heuristically generating type-based attribute signatures based on both local and global computation approaches. We show experimentally that by decomposing data into q-grams and then considering signatures based on q-gram distributions, we achieve very good classification accuracy under the assumption that a large sample of the data is available for building the signatures. Then, we turn our attention to cases where a very small sample of the data is available, and hence accurately capturing the q-gram distribution of a given data type is almost impossible. We propose techniques based on dimensionality reduction and soft-clustering that exploit correlations between attributes to improve classification accuracy.