Employing Inductive Databases in Concrete Applications

In this paper we present the application of the inductive database approach to two practical analytical case studies: Web usage mining in Web logs and financial data. As far as concerns the Web domain, we have considered the enriched XML Web logs, that we call conceptual logs, produced by specific Web applications. These ones have been built by using a conceptual model, namely WebML, and its accompanying CASE tool, WebRatio. The Web conceptual logs integrate the usual information about user requests with meta-data concerning the Web site structure. As far as concerns the analysis of financial data, we have considered the trade stock exchange index Dow Jones and studied its component stocks from 1997 to 2002 using the so-called technical analysis. Technical analysis consists in the identification of the relevant (graphical) patterns that occur in the plot of evolution of a stock quote as time proceeds, often adopting different time granularities. On the plots the correlations between distinctive variables of the stocks quote are pointed out, such as the quote trend, the percentage variation and the volume of the stocks exchanged. In particular we adopted candle-sticks, a figurative pattern representing in a condensed diagram the evolution of the stock quotes in a daily stock exchange. In technical analysis, candle-sticks have been frequently used by practitioners to predict the trend of the stocks quotes in the market. We then apply a data mining language, namely MINE RULE, to these data in order to identify different types of patterns. As far as Web data is concerned, recurrent navigation paths, page contents most frequently visited, and anomalies such as intrusion attempts or a harmful usage of the resources are among the most important patterns. As far as concerns the financial domain, we searched for the sets of stocks which frequently exhibited a positive daily exchange in the same days, so as to constitute a collection of quotes for the constitution of the customers' portfolio, or the candle-sticks frequently associated to certain stocks, or finally the most similar stocks, in the sense that they mostly presented in the same dates the same typology of candle-stick, that is the same behaviour in time.