Update Management in Decision Support Systems
Résumé
Forecasting is the process of making statements about events
whose actual outcomes have not yet been observed. It is used for decades
in different fields like climate, crime, health, business... Although the
purpose of different forecasting systems is not the same, in general, they
help decision-makers to make appropriate plans for future likely events.
As the nature of forecasting methods and measures are often quantitative, these predictive analytics systems usually use a data warehouse
to store data and OLAP tools to visualize query/simulation results. A
specific feature of forecasting systems regarding predictions analysis is
backward propagation of updates, which is the computation of the
impact, on raw data, of modifications performed on summaries.
In data warehouses, some methods propagate updates over hierarchies
when modifications are performed on data sources. However, so far, very
few works have been devoted to update propagation from summaries to
raw data. This paper proposes an algorithm called PAM (Propagation
of Aggregate-based Modification), to efficiently propagate modifications
performed on summaries to raw data, and then to other summaries. Ex-
periments have been conducted on an operational application.