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<article xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
  <front>
    <journal-meta />
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>An In-Database Rough Set Toolkit</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Frank Beer</string-name>
          <email>frank.beer@informatik.hs-fulda.de</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Ulrich Buhler</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>University of Applied Sciences Fulda Leipziger Stra e 123</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>36037 Fulda</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="DE">Germany</country>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <fpage>146</fpage>
      <lpage>157</lpage>
      <abstract>
        <p>The Rough Set Theory is a common methodology to discover hidden patterns in data. Most software systems and libraries using methods of that theory originated in the mid 1990s and su er from timeconsuming operations or high communication costs. Today on the other hand there is a perceptible trend for in-database analytics allowing ondemand decision support. While data processing and predictive models remain in one system, data movement is eliminated and latency is reduced. In this paper we contribute to this trend by computing traditional rough sets solely inside relational databases. As such we leverage the e cient data structures and algorithms provided by that systems. Thereby we introduce a baseline framework for in-database mining supported by Rough Set Theory. Immediately, it can be utilized for common discovery tasks such as feature selection or reasoning under uncertainty and is applicable to most conventional databases as our experiments indicate.</p>
      </abstract>
      <kwd-group>
        <kwd>concept approximation</kwd>
        <kwd>in-database analytics</kwd>
        <kwd>knowledge discovery in databases</kwd>
        <kwd>relational algebra</kwd>
        <kwd>relational database systems</kwd>
        <kwd>rough set theory</kwd>
      </kwd-group>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>-</title>
      <p>Over the past decades, the huge quantities of data accumulating as a part of
business operations or scienti c research raised the necessity for managing and
analyzing them e ectively. As a result, Rough Set Theory (RST) became
subject to these interdisciplinary areas as reliable instrument of extracting hidden
knowledge from data. That trend is visible in the versatile existence of rough
setbased software libraries and tools interfacing data from at les [1{4]. The design
of such libraries and tools, however, su ers when applying them to real-world
data sets due to resource and time-consuming le operations. To overcome this
technological drawback, researchers have made the e ort to build more scalable
rough set systems by utilizing relational databases which provide very e cient
structures and algorithms designed to handle huge amounts of information [5{9].
However, the exploitation of database technology can be further extended. One
can assess these relational systems to be expandable platforms capable of
solving complex mining tasks independently. This design principle has been broadly
established under the term in-database analytics [10]. It provides essential
benets, because hidden knowledge is stored in relational repositories predominantly
either given through transactional data or warehouses. Thus, pattern extraction
can be applied in a more data-centric fashion. As such, data transports to
external mining frameworks are minimized and processing time can be reduced to a
large extend. That given, one can observe database manufacturers continiously
expand their engines for analytical models1 such as association rule mining or
data classi cation.</p>
      <p>A full integration of rough sets inside relational systems is most favorable
where both processing and data movement is costly. Unfortunately in-database
processing and related applications are only covered partially in existing RST
literature. Few practical attempts have been made to express the fundamental
concept approximation based on existing database operations. In this paper we
concentrate on that gap and present a concrete model to calculate rough sets
inside relational databases. We rede ne the traditional concept approximation and
compute it by utilizing extended relational algebra. This model can be translated
to various SQL dialects and thus enriches most conventional database systems.
In line with ordinary RST our proposed model can be applied to common mining
problems such as dimensionality reduction, pattern extraction or classi cation.
Instrumenting SQL and its extensions enable us to cover further steps in the
classic knowledge discovery process implicitly including selection and
preprocessing. Combined, we obtain a baseline toolkit for in-database mining which
relies on rough set methodology and database operations. It is natively
applicable without the use of external software logic at low communication costs.
Additionally, relational database engines have been signi cantly improved over
the last decades, implementing both a high degree of parallelism for queries and
physical operations based on hash algorithms which is a major factor for the
e ciency of our model.</p>
      <p>The remainder is structured as follows: First we present important aspects of
the RST (Section 2). In Section 3 we review ideas and prototypes developed by
other authors. Section 4 restructures the concept approximation. The resulting
propositions are utilized to build a model based on database operations in Section
5. Then we brie y demonstrate how our model scales (Section 6). Based on that,
we present future work (Section 7) and conclude in Section 8.
2</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>Rough Set Preliminaries</title>
      <p>Proposed in the early 1980s by Zdzislaw Pawlak [11, 12], RST is a
mathematical framework to analyze data under vagueness and uncertainty. In this section
1 see Data Mining Extensions for Microsoft SQL Server: https://msdn.microsoft.
com/en-us/library/ms132058.aspx (June, 2015) or Oracle Advanced Analytics:
http://oracle.com/technetwork/database/options/advanced-analytics (June,
2015)
we outline principles of that theory: the basic data structures including the
indiscernibility relation (Section 2.1) and the illustration of the concept
approximation (Section 2.2).
2.1</p>
      <sec id="sec-2-1">
        <title>Information Systems and Object Indiscernibility</title>
        <p>Information in RST is structured in an Information System (IS) [13], i.e. a data
table consisting of objects and attributes. Such an IS can thus be expressed in
a tuple A = hU; Ai, where the universe of discourse U = fx1; :::; xng; n 2 N,
is a set of objects characterized by the feature set A = fa1; :::; amg; m 2 N,
such that a : U ! Va; 8a 2 A, where Va represents the value range of attribute
a. An extension to an IS is the Decision System (DS). A DS even holds a set
of attributes where some context-speci c decision is represented. It consists of
common condition features A and the decision attributes di 2 D with di : U !
Vdi ; 1 i jDj and A \ D = ;. A DS is denoted by AD = hU; A; Di. If we have
for any a 2 A [ D : a(x) =?, i.e. a missing value, the underlying structure is
called incomplete, otherwise we call it complete.</p>
        <p>The indiscernibility relation classi es objects based on their characteristics.
Formally, it is a parametrizable equivalence relation with respect to a speci ed
attribute set and can be de ned as follows: Let be an IS A = hU; Ai, B A, then
the indiscernibility relation IN DA(B) = f(x; y) 2 U2 j a(x) = a(y); 8a 2 Bg
induces a partition U=IN DA(B) = fK1; :::; Kpg; p 2 N of disjoint equivalence
classes over U with respect to B. Out of convenience we write IN DB or U=B to
indicate the resulting partition.
2.2</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-2-2">
        <title>Concept Approximation</title>
        <p>To describe or predict an ordinary set of objects in the universe, RST provides an
approximation of that target concept applying the indiscernibility relation. Let
be A = hU; Ai, B A and a concept X U. Then, the B-lower approximation
of the concept X can be speci ed through
while the B-upper approximation of X is de ned as</p>
        <p>XB = SfK 2 IN DB j K</p>
        <p>
          Xg
XB = SfK 2 IN DB j K \ X 6= ;g :
(
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
          )
(
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
          )
Traditionally, (
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
          ) and (
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
          ) can be expressed in a tuple hXB; XBi, i.e. the rough set
approximation of X with respect to the knowledge in B. In a rough set, we can
assert objects in XB to be fully or partly contained in X, while objects in XB
can be determined to be surely in the concept. Hence, there may be equivalence
classes which describe X only in an uncertain fashion. This constitutes the
Bboundary XB = XB XB. Depending on the characteristics of XB we get
an indication of the roughness of hXB; XBi. For XB = ;, we can classify X
decisively, while for XB 6= ;, the information in B appears to be insu cient to
describe X properly. The latter leads to an inconsistency in the data. The rest
of objects not involved in hXB; XBi seems to be unimportant and thus can be
disregarded. This set is called B-outside region and is the relative complement
of XB with respect to U, i.e. U XB.
        </p>
        <p>When we are focused in approximating all available concepts induced by
the decision attributes, RST provides general notations consequently. Let be
AD = hU; A; Di and B A; E D, then all decision classes induced by IN DE
can be expressed and analyzed by two sets, i.e. the B-positive region denoted as
and the B-boundary region</p>
        <p>P OSB(E) = SX2INDE</p>
        <p>XB
BN DB(E) = SX2INDE</p>
        <p>
          XB :
(
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
          )
(
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4">4</xref>
          )
For P OSB(E) and BN DB(E) we get a complete indication whether the
expressiveness of attributes B is su cient in order to classify objects well in terms of
the decisions given in E. Based on that, the concept approximation is suitable
for a varity of data mining problems. Among others, it can be applied to
quantify imprecision, rule induction or feature dependency analysis including core
and reduct computation for dimensionality reduction [12].
3
        </p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>Related Work</title>
      <p>The amount of existing RST literature intersecting with databases theory
increased continuously since the beginning. In this section we outline the most
relevant concepts and systems introduced by other authors.</p>
      <p>One of the rst systems combining RST with database systems was
introduced in [5]. The presented approach exploits database potentials only partially,
because used SQL commands are embedded inside external programming logic.
Porting this sort-based implementation for in-database applications implies the
usage of procedural structures such as cursors, which is not favorable in
processing enormous data. In [14], the authors modify relational algebra to calculate
the concept approximation. Database internals need to be touched and hence a
general employment is not given. The approaches in [6, 7] utilize e cient
relational algebra for feature selection. The algorithms omit the usage of the concept
approximation by other elaborated rough set properties. This factor limits the
application to dimension reduction only. Sun et al. calculate rough sets based
on extended equivalence matrices inside databases [9]. Once data is transformed
into that matrix structure, the proposed methods apply but rely on procedural
logic rather than scalable database operations. The work of Nguyen aims for a
reduction of huge data loads in the knowledge discovery process [15]. Therefore
appropriate methods are introduced using simpler SQL queries to minimize
trafc in client-server architectures. The software design follows to the one in [5]. In
[8], Chan transforms RST into a multiset decision table which allows to
calculate the concept approximation with database queries. The initial construction
of such a data table relies on the execution of dynamic queries, helper tables and
row-by-row updates as stated in [16] and thus depends on ine cient
preprocessing. The work of Naouali et al. implements -RST in data warehouse
environments [17]. The algorithm relies on iterative processing and insert commands to
determine the nal classi cation. Details about its e ciency are not presented.
Another model is known as rough relational database [18]. These systems base
on multi-valued relations designed to query data under uncertainty. Over the
years, speci c operations and properties of this theoretic model have been
further extended. The authors in [19] try to port the rough relational data model
to mature database systems. Details of migrating its algebra are not reported.
Infobright is another database system that focuses on fast data processing
towards ad-hoc querying [20]. This is achieve by a novel data retrieval strategy
based on compression and inspired by RST. Data is organized underneath the
knowledge grid. It is used to get estimated query results rather than seeking
costly information from disk, which is valid to some domain of interest.</p>
      <p>Most discussed approaches utilize ine cient procedural structures, external
programs or leverage relational operations for very speci c subjects. In contrast,
we make use of existing, reliable and highly optimized database operations to
compute the concept approximation not employing further procedural
mechanisms. With this, we stretch the applicability of independent databases to a
broader range of rough set mining problems.
4</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>Rede ning the Concept Approximation</title>
      <p>
        This section points out the formal ideas of transforming Pawlak's concept
approximation to relational database systems by introducing a mapping of (
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ) and
(
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
        ) to rewritten set-oriented expressions. Those propositions can then be applied
to database algebra easily and enable us to transport both, the positive region
and the boundary region in addition. We also show that these rede nings are no
extensions to the traditional model, but equivalent terms.
      </p>
      <p>
        Explained in Section 2.2, a rough set hXB; XBi can typically be extracted
from a concept X U of an IS A = hU; Ai on a speci c attribute set B A,
while the classi cation of each object is based on the induced partition U=B. At
this point, we make use of X=B := X=IN DA(B) = fH1; :::; Hqg; q 2 N,
restructuring the concept approximation of X. Thus, we can deduce two relationships
between classes H 2 X=B and K 2 U=B: H \ K 6= ;, H \ K = ;. This basic
idea leads to two propositions, which we discuss in the remainder of this section:
XB = SfH 2 U=B j H 2 X=Bg
(
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5</xref>
        )
Proof. Considering the classes H 2 X=B, the following two cases are of interest
to form the B-lower approximation: (a) 9K 2 U=B : K = H X and (b)
9K 2 U=B : K 6= H and K \ H 6= ;. Case (b) implies 9z 2 K : z 2= X
and thus K * X. As a result, only classes K = H are relevant. Likewise, (
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        )
only contains objects of classes K 2 U=B, where K X. We consider X=B
that induces classes H 2 U=B and H0 2= U=B, because X U. Combined, we
immediately get to (
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5</xref>
        ).
      </p>
      <p>XB = SfK 2 U=B j 9H 2 X=B : H</p>
      <p>Kg</p>
      <p>
        tu
(
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">6</xref>
        )
Proof. On the one hand, the partition X=B can only produce equivalence classes
H; H0 X which satisfy H 2 U=B and H0 2= U=B. Obviously, those H are
members of the B-lower approximation, whereas each class H0 has a matching partner
class K with H0 K 2 U=B which build the B-boundary approximation. With
these classes H; K, we directly receive: XB = XB [ XB. On the other hand,
XB holds objects of classes K 2 U=B with K \ X 6= ; (see (
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
        )), i.e. each class
K 2 X=B and K H 2 X=B. This is proposed by (
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">6</xref>
        ). tu
      </p>
      <p>
        Up to this point, the B-boundary approximation and the B-outside region
remain untouched for further restructuring since both sets build on the B-lower
and B-upper approximation. They have the same validity to the propositions in
(
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5</xref>
        ) and (
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">6</xref>
        ) as to the classical rough set model.
5
5.1
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-5">
      <title>Combining RST and Database Systems</title>
      <sec id="sec-5-1">
        <title>Information Systems and Database Tables</title>
        <p>The IS is a speci c way to organize data, similar to a data table in relational
database terms. But there are essential di erences in their scienti c scopes [13].
While an IS is used to discover patterns in a snapshot fashion, the philosophy of
databases concerns with long term data storing and retrieval respectively [21].</p>
        <p>However, we try to overcome these gaps by simply assembling an IS or DS to
the relational database domain considering the following: Let be AD = hU; A; Di
with the universe U = fx1; :::; xng; n 2 N, the features A = fa1; :::; amg; m 2 N
and the decision D = fd1; :::; dpg; p 2 N, then we use the traditional notation of
a (m + p)-ary database relation R Va1 ::: Vam Vd1 ::: Vdp , where Vai
and Vdj are the attribute domains of ai; dj ; 1 i; j; m; p.</p>
        <p>In database theory, the order of attributes in a relation schema has signi
cance to both semantics and operations. With this we simplify the employment
of attributes to nite sets and write A = fa1; :::; aqg; q 2 N for the ordered
appearance in relation R. We notate RA as shortform or RA+D to identify a
decision table. Furthermore modern databases permits duplicated tuples within
its relational structure. We adopt this rudiment with practical relevance and
designate these types of relations as database relation or data table respectively.
5.2</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-5-2">
        <title>Indiscernibility and Relational Operations</title>
        <p>Inspired by [5{7], we make use of extended relational algebra to calculate the
partition of the indiscernibility relation. Using the projection operation B(RA)
allows to project tuples t 2 RA to a speci ed feature subset B A while
eliminating duplicates. Thus, we get each class represented by a proxy tuple
with schema B. A column reduction without duplicate elimination is indicated
by B+(RA). Additionally, we introduce the selection operation (RA) with lter
property and output schema A. Given a geometric repository RA+D (see Figure
1), we may query objects x 2 RA+D that are colored red by x:color=red(RA+D).</p>
        <p>Most relational database systems provide an extension to B(RA), i.e. the
grouping operator . It groups tuples of a relation RA if they share identical
values entirely over an speci ed attribute set G A, i.e. the grouping attributes.
Each group is only represented once in the resulting relation through a proxy
tuple (see -operator). In addition, can be enriched with aggregation
functions f1; :::; fn that may be applied to each group during the grouping phase.
Generally, this operation can be de ned by F ;G;B(RA), where B are the output
features with B G A and F = ff1; :::; fng; n 2 N0. For our purpose we
simply count the number of members in each single group (class) of RA, i.e. the
cardinality expressed by the aggregate count( ), and include it as new feature.
Consolidated, we make use of the following notation</p>
        <p>
          IBG(RA) := card count( )( fcount( )g;G;B (RA))
(
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">7</xref>
          )
where b a(RA) is the renaming operation of an arbitrary attribute a 2 A
to its new name b in table RA. Then IBB(RA) is supposed to be noted as our
compressed multiset representation of a given database table RA considering
feature set B A. An illustration of this composed operation and its parallels
to the RST is depicted in Figure 1 with A = fshape; colorg, D = fdg and B = A.
        </p>
        <p>RA+D
- shape color d
x1 triangle green 0
x2 circle red 1
x3 circle red 1
xx45 scqiurcalree ywehlliotwe 11 , K1
x6 circle white 1
x7 triangle green 0
x8 circle white 1
x9 circle red 0
x10 circle red 0
x1 x7d(x) = 0x10x9x2x3</p>
        <p>K2
K3 K4
x8x4 x6d(x) = 1 x5
,</p>
        <p>IBB(RA+D)
card shape color
2 triangle green
4 circle red
3 circle white
1 square yellow
, carIdBB+sDha(pReA+cDo)lor
2 triangle green
2 circle red
2 circle red
3 circle white
1 square yellow
In practice, the extraction process of a single target concept may vary dependent
on domain and underlying data model. In most cases an ordinary target concept
can be modelled through decision attributes, i.e. a decision table. However there
might be domains of interest, where the concept is located outside the
original data table. Especially, this is the case in highly normalized environments.
We support both approaches within the boundaries of the relational model. As
simpli cation we assume the target concept CA and the original data collection
RA to be given through either adequate relational operations or their native
existence in a relation where CA is a subset of RA.</p>
        <p>Taking this and the previous sections into account, we are now able to
demonstrate the classical concept approximation in terms of relational algebra and its
extensions: Let be RA representing the universe and CA our target concept to
be examined with the feature subset B A, then the B-lower approximation of
the concept can be expressed by</p>
        <p>
          LB(RA; CA) := IBB(CA) \ IBB(RA) :
Initially, (
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
          ) establishes the partition for CA and RA independently. The
intersection then only holds those kinds of equivalence classes included with their full
cardinality in both induced partitions, i.e. the B-lower approximation in terms
of the RST (see (
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5</xref>
          )). The B-upper approxiation contains all equivalence classes
associated with the target concept. Thus, we simply can extract one
representative of these classes from the induced partition of CA applying the information
in B. However, this information is not su cient to get the correct cardinality of
those classes involved. Hence we must consider the data space of RA in order to
nd the number of all equivalences. That methodology can be expressed through
UB(RA; CA) :=
        </p>
        <p>B(CA)</p>
        <p>
          IBB(RA)
(
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
          )
(
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">9</xref>
          )
(
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10</xref>
          )
(
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11">11</xref>
          )
whereas is the natural join operator, assembling two data tables SG; TH
to a new relation R such that s:b = t:b for all tuples s 2 SG; t 2 TH and
attributes b 2 G \ H. Note, R consists of all attributes in G; H, where
overlapping attributes are shown only once. As a result, we get all equivalence classes
with their cardinality, involved in the B-upper approximation (see (
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">6</xref>
          )).
Classically, the B-boundary consists of objects located in the set-di erence of B-upper
and B-lower approximation. Because of the structural unity of LB(RA; CA) and
UB(RA; CA), it can be expressed by
        </p>
        <p>BB(RA; CA) := UB(RA; CA)</p>
        <p>LB(RA; CA) :
Equivalence classes outside the concept approximation can be found when
searching for tuples not included in the B-upper approximation. With the support of
both IBB(RA) and UB(RA; CA), we therefore get the B-outside region
OB(RA; CA) := IBB(RA)</p>
        <p>UB(RA; CA) :</p>
        <p>
          In order to present an equivalent relational mapping of (
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
          ) and (
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4">4</xref>
          ), we rst
have to look at a methodology that allows us to query each target concept
separately. Within a decision table RA+D, let us assume the partition induced
by the information in E D consists of n decision class. For each of these classes
we can nd an appropriate condition i; 1 i n that assists in extracting
the associate tuples t 2 RA+D belonging to each concept CAi . One can simply
think of a walk through E (RA+D). In the i-th iteration we fetch the decision
values, say v1; :::; vm, for the corresponding features in E = fd1; :::dmg; m 2 N
and build i = V1 j m t:dj = vj . Thus, we have access to each decision class
CAi = A+( i (RA+D)) produced by E. With this idea in mind and supported
by (
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
          ) we are now able to introduce the B-positive region: In a decision table
RA+D and B A; E D, the B-positive region is the union of all B-lower
approximations induced by the attributes in E. Those concepts can be retrieved
by CAi ; 1 i n where n is the cardinality of E (RA+D). As a consequence we
get to
        </p>
        <p>
          LB(RA+D; CA1 ) [ ::: [ LB(RA+D; CAn )
(
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref12">12</xref>
          )
which can be rewritten as
        </p>
        <p>Si=1;:::;n IBB(CAi ) \ IBB(RA+D)
such that we nally have the B-positive region in relational terms de ned over
a decision table</p>
        <p>LEB(RA+D) :=</p>
        <p>B0 (IBB+E (RA+D)) \ IBB(RA+D)
with B0 = fcard; b1; :::; bkg; bj 2 B; 1 j k. Likewise, the B-boundary region
consists of tuples in UB(RA+D; CA1 )[:::[UB(RA+D; CAn ) but not in LEB(RA+D),
where CAi ; 1 i n 2 N are the separated target concepts induced by E. Hence,
we can query these through</p>
        <p>Si=1;:::;n UB(RA+D; CAi )</p>
        <p>LEB(RA+D)
which is equivalent to</p>
        <p>IBB(RA+D)</p>
        <p>( B0 (IBB+E (RA+D)) \ IBB(RA+D))
in a complete decision table and immediately come to our de nition of the
Bboundary region</p>
        <p>BBE (RA+D) := IBB(RA+D)</p>
        <p>
          B0 (IBB+E (RA+D))
where B0 = fcard; b1; :::; bkg; bj 2 B; 1 j k. Denote, we directly deduced
LEB(RA+D) and BBE (RA+D) from (
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
          ) and (
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">9</xref>
          ). For practical reasons, further
simpli cation can be applied by removing the -operator. One may verify, this
change still preserves the exact same result set, because both expressions rely
on IBB(RA+D) initially.
6
        </p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-6">
      <title>Experimental Results</title>
      <p>
        In this section, we present the initial experimental results applying the concluded
expressions from Section 5.3 to some well-known data sets and two database
systems. The objective of this experiment is to demonstrate the performance of
our model in a conservative test environment not utilizing major optimization
steps such as the application of indices, table partitioning or compression
strategies. Thus, we get an impression of how the model behaves natively in di erent
databases. We chose PostgreSQL (PSQL) and Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL)
as two prominent engines providing us with the required relational operations.
The hardware pro le2 represents a standalone server environment commonly
used in small and medium-sized organizations. Most of our benchmark data sets
are extracted from [22] varying in data types and distribution. Table 1 states
further details. Both, PSQL and MSSQL provide similar query plans based on hash
2 OS: Microsoft Windows 2012 R2 (Standard edition x64); DBs: Microsoft SQL Server
2014 (Developer edition 12.0.2, 64-bit), PostgreSQL 9.4 (Compiled by Visual C++
build 1800, 64-bit); Memory: 24 GByte; CPU: 16x2.6 GHz Intel Xeon E312xx (Sandy
Bridge); HDD: 500 GByte
(
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13">13</xref>
        )
(
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref14">14</xref>
        )
(
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">15</xref>
        )
(
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16">16</xref>
        )
(
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17">17</xref>
        )
algorithms which we review brie y to understand the priciples: The initial stage
consists of scanning two input sources from disk followed by hash aggregations.
Finally, both aggregated inputs are fused using the hash join operator. Denote,
a hash aggregation only requires one single scan of the given input to build the
resulting hash table. The hash join relies on a build and probe phase where
essentially each of the two incoming inputs is scanned only once. In comparison
to other alternatives, these query plans perform without sorting, but require
memory to build up the hash tables. Once a query runs out of memory,
additional buckets are spilled to disk, which was not the case throughout the series
of experiments. Even though both engines share similar algorithms, MSSQL is
capable of running the queries in parallel while PSQL covers single core
processing only. In general, we realized a very high CPU usage which is characteristic
for the performance of our model. However we further observed that MSSQL
does not scale well processing KDD99, because it is unable to distribute the
workload evenly to all threads. We relate this issue to the lack of appropriate
statistics in the given raw environment including its data distribution, where
three equivalence classes represent 51% of all records. Therefore, we introduce
a revised version called KDD99 M. In contrast, it holds an additional condition
attribute splitting huge classes into chunks of 50K records. Note, this change
does not in uence the approximation, but results in a speed up of 76%. Further
details of the runtime comparison are given in Figure 2. Summarized, we could
achieve reasonable responses without major optimization steps. In particular,
our model scales well appending additional cores in 9 out of 10 tests. Supported
by this characteristic, MSSQL computes most queries within few seconds.
7
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-7">
      <title>Future Work</title>
      <p>The evaluation of the previous section shows how our RST model behaves in
a native relational environment. However, further practical experiments are
required, which we will address in the near future. In our domain of interest, i.e.
network and data security, we will study classical as well as modern cyber
attack scenarios in order to extract signi cant features of each single attack in
both IPv4 and IPv6 environments. Our model is most suited for that subject,
because it is designed to process huge amounts of data e ciently and can
handle uncertainty which is required for proper intrusion detection. Additionally, we
will use the outcome of our model to generate precise and characteristic attack
signatures from incoming tra c and construct a rule-based classi er. Enabled by
in-database capabilities, we can compute the resulting decision rules in parallel
and integrate that approach into our existing data store. Hence, we can avoid
huge data transports which is crucial for our near real time system.
8</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-8">
      <title>Conclusion</title>
      <p>In the past, the traditional Rough Set Theory has become a very popular
framework to analyze and classify data based on equivalence relations. In this work we
presented an approach to transport the concept approximation of that theory to
the domain of relational databases in order to make use of well-established and
e cient algorithms supported by these systems. Our model is de ned on
complete data tables and compatible with data inconsistencies. The evaluation on
various prominent data sets showed promising results. The queries achieved low
latency along with minor optimization and preprocessing e ort. Therefore, we
assume our model is suitable for a wide range of disciplines analyzing data within
its relational sources. That given, we introduced a compact mining toolkit which
is based on rough set methodology and enabled for in-database analytics.
Immediately, it can be utilized to e ciently explore data sets, expose decision rules,
identify signi cant features or data inconsistencies that are common challenges
in the process of knowledge discovery in databases.</p>
      <p>Acknowledgments. The authors deeply thank Maren and Martin who
provided expertise and excellent support in the initial phase of this work.</p>
    </sec>
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