Balancing Familiarity and Curiosity in Data Exploration with Deep Reinforcement Learning

The ability to find a set of records in Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) hinges on the scattering of objects in the data set and the on users’ knowledge of data and their ability to express their needs. This yields a wide range of EDA scenarios and solutions that differ in the guidance they provide to users. In this paper, we investigate the interplay between modeling curiosity and familiarity in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and expressive data exploration operators. We formalize curiosity as intrinsic reward and familiarity as extrinsic reward. We examine the behavior of several policies learned for different weights for those rewards. Our experiments on SDSS, a very large sky survey data set1 provide several insights and justify the need for a deeper examination of combining DRL and data exploration operators that go beyond drill-downs and roll-ups.