Splash: Integrated Ad-Hoc Querying of Data and Statistical Models

This paper presents a system called Splash, which integrates statistical modeling and SQL for the purpose of adhoc querying and analysis. Splash supports a novel, simple, and practical abstraction of statistical modeling as an aggregate function, which in turn provides for natural integration with standard SQL queries and a relational DBMS. In addition, we introduce and implement a novel representatives operator to help explain statistical models using a limited number of representative examples. We present a proof-of-concept implementation of the system, which includes several performance optimizations. An experimental study indicates that our system scales well to large input datasets. Further, to demonstrate the simplicity and usability of the new abstractions, we conducted a case study using Splash to perform a series of exploratory analyses using network log data. Our study indicates that the query-based interface is simpler than a common data mining software package, and for ad-hoc analysis, it often requires less programming effort to use.