View-Driven Deduplication with Active Learning

Abstract: Visual analytics systems such as Tableau are increasingly popular for interactive data exploration. These tools, however, do not currently assist users with detecting or resolving potential data quality problems including the well-known deduplication problem. Recent approaches for deduplication focus on cleaning entire datasets and commonly require hundreds to thousands of user labels. In this paper, we address the problem of deduplication in the context of visual data analytics. We present a new approach for record deduplication that strives to produce the cleanest view possible with a limited budget for data labeling. The key idea behind our approach is to consider the impact that individual tuples have on a visualization and to monitor how the view changes during cleaning. With experiments on nine different visualizations for two real-world datasets, we show that our approach produces significantly cleaner views for small labeling budgets than state-of-the-art alternatives and that it also stops the cleaning process after requesting fewer labels.