Automating Exploratory Data Analysis via Machine Learning: An Overview

Summary: Survey of automating Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) via ML, from action recommendations to deep RL/seq2seq for end-to-end EDA. Discusses data-management challenges, modeling user interest, and open questions to reduce manual exploratory effort. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: h52a389da4b42f6c0
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2020
Pagerank: 6.551459e-05
Overall Rank: 4,519 | 69.71%
DOI: 10.1145/3318464.3383126

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Tova Milo (Tel Aviv University)
2. Amit Somech (Tel Aviv University)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{milo_sigmod20,
        title = {{Automating Exploratory Data Analysis via Machine Learning: An Overview}},
        author = {Milo, Tova and Somech, Amit},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '20},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/3318464.3383126},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3318464.3383126},
        year = {2020}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 6 of 6 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
4,149	Missing Value Imputation on Multidimensional Time Series	2021	VLDB	6.7631758e-05
5,008	XInsight: eXplainable Data Analysis Through The Lens of Causality	2023	SIGMOD	6.3049458e-05
8,715	Knowledge Graph Exploration Systems: are we lost?	2022	CIDR	5.2705676e-05
9,170	MetaInsight: Automatic Discovery of Structured Knowledge for Exploratory Data Analysis	2021	SIGMOD	5.2018029e-05
11,438	Towards Automated Cross-domain Exploratory Data Analysis through Large Language Models	2025	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
12,018	PyExplore: Query Recommendations for Data Exploration without Query Logs	2021	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 17 of 17 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
395	SeeDB: Efficient Data-Driven Visualization Recommendations to Support Visual Analytics	2015	VLDB	0.00019125046
679	JOSIE: Overlap Set Similarity Search for Finding Joinable Tables in Data Lakes	2019	SIGMOD	0.00014802
864	SnipSuggest: Context-Aware Autocompletion for SQL	2011	VLDB	0.00013358173
924	Effortless Data Exploration with zenvisage: An Expressive and Interactive Visual Analytics System	2017	VLDB	0.00013033863
929	Intelligent Rollups in Multidimensional OLAP Data	2001	VLDB	0.000130092
986	User-adaptive exploration of multidimensional data	2000	VLDB	0.00012645438
1,220	Overview of Data Exploration Techniques	2015	SIGMOD	0.00011449992
1,416	Northstar: An Interactive Data Science System	2018	VLDB	0.00010707248
2,057	Automatically Generating Data Exploration Sessions Using Deep Reinforcement Learning	2020	SIGMOD	9.0995439e-05
2,170	Data Polygamy: The Many-Many Relationships among Urban Spatio-Temporal Data Sets	2016	SIGMOD	8.9149718e-05
3,293	Controlling False Discoveries During Interactive Data Exploration	2017	SIGMOD	7.4335786e-05
3,423	Ava: From Data to Insights Through Conversation	2017	CIDR	7.2974827e-05
4,526	Optimization for Active Learning-based Interactive Database Exploration	2019	VLDB	6.5474668e-05
6,344	New Trends on Exploratory Methods for Data Analytics	2017	VLDB	5.7903641e-05
6,955	REACT: Context-Sensitive Recommendations for Data Analysis	2016	SIGMOD	5.6193552e-05
8,531	Exploring the Data Wilderness through Examples	2019	SIGMOD	5.3063661e-05
10,209	Towards Autonomous, Hands-Free Data Exploration	2020	CIDR	5.0491152e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	6,344	New Trends on Exploratory Methods for Data Analytics	2017	VLDB
2	7,173	Guided Exploration of Data Summaries	2022	VLDB
3	4,526	Optimization for Active Learning-based Interactive Database Exploration	2019	VLDB
4	8,531	Exploring the Data Wilderness through Examples	2019	SIGMOD
5	9,170	MetaInsight: Automatic Discovery of Structured Knowledge for Exploratory Data Analysis	2021	SIGMOD
6	6,182	Guided Exploration of User Groups	2020	VLDB
7	10,209	Towards Autonomous, Hands-Free Data Exploration	2020	CIDR
8	9,483	Intelligent Agents for Data Exploration	2024	VLDB
9	2,057	Automatically Generating Data Exploration Sessions Using Deep Reinforcement Learning	2020	SIGMOD
10	1,220	Overview of Data Exploration Techniques	2015	SIGMOD