Semantic Subgroup Discovery Systems and Workflows in the SDM-Toolkit

This paper addresses semantic data mining, a new data mining paradigm in which ontologies are exploited in the process of data mining and knowledge discovery. This paradigm is introduced together with new semantic subgroup discovery systems SDM-search for enriched gene sets (SEGS) and SDM-Aleph. These systems are made publicly available in the new SDM-Toolkit for semantic data mining. The toolkit is implemented in the Orange4WS data mining platform that supports knowledge discovery workflow construction from local and distributed data mining services. On the basis of the experimental evaluation of semantic subgroup discovery systems on two publicly available biomedical datasets, the paper results in a thorough quantitative and qualitative evaluation of SDM-SEGS and SDM-Aleph and their comparison with SEGS, a system for enriched gene set discovery from microarray data.