# Interactive Data Exploration with Smart Drill-Down

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.0364 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.0364/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 1 Dec 2014.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [BI-REC: Guided Data Analysis for Conversational Business Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00467/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present em smart drill-down, an operator for interactively exploring a relational table to discover and summarize "interesting" groups of tuples. Each group of tuples is described by a em rule. For instance, the rule (a, b, star, 1000) tells us that there are a thousand tuples with value a in the first column and b in the second column (and any value in the third column). Smart drill-down presents an analyst with a list of rules that together describe interesting aspects of the table. The analyst can tailor the definition of interesting, and can interactively apply smart drill-down on an existing rule to explore that part of the table. We demonstrate that the underlying optimization problems are sc NP-Hard, and describe an algorithm for finding the approximately optimal list of rules to display when the user uses a smart drill-down, and a dynamic sampling scheme for efficiently interacting with large tables. Finally, we perform experiments on real datasets on our experimental prototype to demonstrate the usefulness of smart drill-down and study the performance of our algorithms.