Christos Faloutsos KDD Innovation Award Talk

Data Mining is compression, and compression is undecidable, therefore ...

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Date:

Christos Faloutsos was the winner of 2010 SIGKDD Innovation Award

In his very lively and fun talk entitled

Large Graph Mining
Data Mining for fun (and profit)

(after thanking many colleagues, nominators, teachers, students, family, funding agencies, ...)

Christos presented his thesis:

1. Data mining = compression

(Christos Faloutsos, Vasileios Megalooikonomou: On data mining, compression, and Kolmogorov complexity. Data Min. Knowl. Discov. 15(1): 3-20 (2007) )

2. Compression is undecidable

Theorem: for an arbitrary string x, computing its Kolmogorov complexity K(x) is undecidable

3. Data miners have job security (:-)

since there will always be better data mining tools/models/patterns to be discovered

He also showed many interesting examples of models, such as the graph of Metabolic rate vs Mass which shows very unusual patterns found in real data.

Here is PDF of Prof. Faloutsos talk