Hazar Harmouch had successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation on August 17th, 2020 at the HPI! Her work focused on the topic "Single-column Data Profiling".
Short Abstract of her work:
The research area of data profiling consists of a large set of methods and processes to examine a given dataset and determine metadata about it. Typically, different data profiling tasks address different kinds of metadata, comprising either various statistics about individual columns (Single-column Analysis) or relationships among them (Dependency Discovery). Among the basic statistics about a column are data type, header, the number of unique values (the column's cardinality), maximum and minimum values, the number of NULL values, and the value distribution. Dependencies involve, for instance, functional dependencies (FDs), inclusion dependencies (INDs), and their approximate versions.
Data profiling has a wide range of conventional use cases, namely data exploration, cleansing, and integration. The produced metadata is also useful for database management and schema reverse engineering. Data profiling has also more novel use cases, such as big data analytics. The generated metadata describes the structure of the data at hand, how to import it, what it is about, and how much of it there is. Thus, data profiling can be considered as an important preparatory task for many data analysis and mining scenarios to assess which data might be useful and to reveal and understand a new dataset's characteristics.
