Jilles Vreeken

[yì-luhs] [frei-kun]

Post-doctoral Researcher in the
Advanced Database Research and Modeling Group
ADReM

Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
University of Antwerp

CMI G.323
Middelheimlaan 1
B-2020 Antwerpen
Belgium

jilles.vreeken(a)ua.ac.be

+32 32 653 869

+32 32 653 204

Jilles at work at Zion National Park

I'm a post-doctoral researcher in the Antwerp University ADReM group, supported by a Post-Doctoral Fellowship of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO). I obtained my Ph.D. in 2009 for my thesis 'Making Pattern Mining Useful', under supervision of prof. Arno Siebes in the Algorithmic Data Analysis group of the Utrecht University.

My research is mainly concerned with pattern mining, how to find interesting patterns, and how put them to good use. For this, I typically employ well-founded statistical methods and insights from Information Theory. The Minimum Description Length (MDL) and Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) principles in particular have proven to be valuable tools.

Currently I'm investigating statistical and information theoretic techniques for identifying informative local structures such as patterns in large collections of data, how to efficiently mine good data descriptions directly from data, and study well-founded approaches for meaningfully comparing between, and validation of, exploratory data analysis results.

Below, you'll find an overview of my activities, as well as a selection of my recent publications. You might further be interested in my publications, implementations, our pattern set mining tutorial (PKDD'10, ICDM'11), or our workshops on Interactive Data Exploration and Analytics (IDEA), and Outlier Detection and Description (ODD) at KDD'13.

or, in case you're looking for a bit of procrastination, consider
Research in Progress — the secret life of research, through the medium of animated GIFs.

Activities

Organisation & Invited Talks
- Workshop Co-Chair of IEEE ICDM 2012, Brussels, Belgium.
- Organiser of the ACM SIGKDD 2013 Workshop on Interactive Data Exploration and Analytics (IDEA), Chicago, USA.
- Organiser of the ACM SIGKDD 2013 Workshop on Outlier Detection and Description (ODD), Chicago, USA.
- Organiser of the ECML PKDD 2012 Workshop on Instant Interactive Data Mining (IID), Bristol, UK.
- Organiser of the ACM SIGKDD 2010 Workshop on Useful Patterns (UP), Washington DC, USA.
- Organiser and speaker of the IEEE ICDM 2011 Tutorial on Mining Sets of Patterns, Vancouver, Canada.
- Organiser and speaker of the ECML PKDD 2010 Tutorial on Mining Sets of Patterns, Barcelona, Spain.
- Invited speaker at the IEEE ICDM 2011 Workshop on Data Mining for Computational Collective Intelligence.
- Invited speaker at the ECML PKDD 2008 Workshop From Local Patterns to Global Models, Antwerp, Belgium.
Awards & Grants
- KDD'11 Best Student Paper Award for 'Tell Me What I Need to Know'
- ACM SIGKDD Doctoral Dissertation Award 2010 Runner-Up
- ECML PKDD'09 Best Student Paper Award for 'Identifying the Components'
- Research Project 'Instant, Interactive & Adaptive Data Mining' of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) ('12–'15)
- Post-Doctoral Fellowship of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) ('10–'13)
- UA-BOF-KP Small Project (2010)
- UA-BOF-IWS Postdoctoral Researcher ('09–'10)
Editorial Board
- Member of the Guest Editorial Board for the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases – Journal Track (ECMLPKDD '13)
Reviewer for
- Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (DAMI)
- Information Systems (IS)
- Knowledge and Information Systems (KAIS)
- Maching Learning journal (MLj)
- Social Network Analysis and Mining (SNAM)
- Statistical Analysis and Data Mining (SAM)
- Transactions on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (TKDD)
- Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE)
- Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST)
Program Committee Memberships
- ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD '10–'13)
- IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM '12)
- European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD '08–'13)
- SIAM Conference on Data Mining (SDM '10–'11)

Teaching

Undergraduate Courses
- Artificial Intelligence (6 ECTS) ('12–'13)
- Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (3 ECTS) ('09–'12)
- Introduction to Data Mining (3 ECTS) ('09–'11)
- Internet Programming (7.2 ECTS, assisting) ('06–'08)
- Databases (7.2 ECTS, assisting) ('05–'06)
Graduate Courses
- Advanced Data Mining (6 ECTS) ('09–'13)

Master Thesis (co-)Supervision
- Thomas Van Brussel (2012)
- Tanja Van den Eede (2011)
- Andie Similon (2010)
- Sander Schuckmann (2009)
PhD Thesis (daily) (co-)Supervision
- M. Emin Aksehirli (ongoing)
- Sandy Moens (ongoing)
- Thomas Van Brussel (ongoing)

Selected Recent Publications (go here for the complete list)

2013
	Akoglu, L, Vreeken, J, Tong, H, Chau, DH, Tatti, N & Faloutsos, C Mining Connection Pathways for Marked Nodes in Large Graphs. In: Proceedings of the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM'13), SIAM, 2013. (oral presentation, 14.4% acceptance rate; overal 25%)
	Nguyen, HV, Müller, E, Vreeken, J, Keller, F & Böhm, K CMI: An Information-Theoretic Contrast Measure for Enhancing Subspace Cluster and Outlier Detection. In: Proceedings of the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM'13), pp 1-9, SIAM, 2013. (oral presentation, 14.4% acceptance rate; overal 25%)
	Mampaey, M & Vreeken, J Summarizing Categorical Data by Clustering Attributes. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery vol.26(1), pp 130-173, Springer, 2013. (IF 1.545)
	Zimek, A & Vreeken, J The Blind Men and the Elephant: About Meeting the Problem of Multiple Truths in Data from Clustering and Pattern Mining Perspectives. Machine Learning, Springer (IF 1.587) (In Press)
2012
	Prakash, BA, Vreeken, J & Faloutsos, C Spotting Culprits in Epidemics: How many and Which ones?. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM'12), pp 11-20, IEEE, 2012. (full paper, 10.7% acceptance rate; overall 20%)
	Akoglu, L, Tong, H, Vreeken, J & Faloutsos, C Fast and Reliable Anomaly Detection in Categoric Data. In: Proceedings of ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM'12), pp 415-424, ACM, 2012. (full paper, 13.4% acceptance rate; 27% overall)
	Tatti, N & Vreeken, J Discovering Descriptive Tile Trees by Fast Mining of Optimal Geometric Subtiles. In: Proceedings of the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECMLPKDD'12), pp 9-24, Springer, 2012.
	Tatti, N & Vreeken, J The Long and the Short of It: Summarising Event Sequences with Serial Episodes. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD'12), pp 462-470, ACM, 2012. (17.6% acceptance rate)
	Smets, K & Vreeken, J Slim: Directly Mining Descriptive Pattern. In: Proceedings of the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM'12), pp 236-247, SIAM, 2012. (oral presentation, 14.6% acceptance rate)
	Chau, DH, Akoglu, L, Vreeken, J, Tong, H & Faloutsos, C TourViz: Interactive Visualization of Connection Pathways in Large Graphs. Demo at, and included in: Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD'12), pp 1516-1519, ACM, 2012.
	Mampaey, M, Vreeken, J & Tatti, N Summarizing Data Succinctly with the Most Informative Itemsets. Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data vol.6(4), pp 1-44, ACM, 2012.
	Tatti, N & Vreeken, J Comparing Apples and Oranges – Measuring Differences between Exploratory Data Mining Results. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery vol.25(2), pp 173-207, Springer, 2012. (IF 1.545) (ECMLPKDD'11 Special Issue)