Deep Clustering for Data Cleaning and Integration

Deep Learning (DL) techniques now constitute the state-of-the-art for important problems in areas such as text and image processing, and there have been impactful results that deploy DL in several data management tasks. Deep Clustering (DC) has recently emerged as a sub-discipline of DL, in which data representations are learned in tandem with clustering, with a view to automatically identifying the features of the data that lead to improved clustering results. While DC has been used to good effect in several domains, particularly in image processing, the impact of DC on mainstream data management tasks remains unexplored. In this paper, we address this gap by investigating the impact of DC in data cleaning and integration tasks, specifically schema inference, entity resolution, and domain discovery, tasks that represent clustering from the perspective of tables, rows, and columns, respectively. In this setting, we compare and contrast several DC and non-DC clustering algorithms using standard benchmarks. The results show, among other things, that the most effective DC algorithms consistently outperform non-DC clustering algorithms for data integration tasks. However, we observed a significant correlation between the DC method and embedding approaches for rows, columns, and tables, highlighting that the suitable combination can enhance the efficiency of DC methods.