Towards the automation of intelligent data analysis

Data analysis tools are still very much a collection of data analysis methods that require analysis experts as users. On the other hand, many business users are keen to apply data analysis to business data in order to understand it or to make predictions to improve on their business decisions. In order to make state-of-the-art data analysis techniques available to such non-experts, we developed a wizard for our data analysis tool SPIDA that selects appropriate data analysis methods given soft high-level requirements. The wizard also configures and runs the chosen methods automatically. This paper describes our general approach to automating data analysis, in particular, how to select an appropriate data analysis algorithm.