Abstract
Using statistical learning theory and machine learning techniques surrounding the principles of Rival Penalised Competitive Learning (RPCL), this chapter proposes a novel approach aiming to aid Big Data Thinning, i.e., analysing only the potential data sub-spaces and not the entire extensive data space. Data scientists, data analysts, IoT applications and Edge-centric services are in need for predictive modelling and analytics. This is achieved by learning from past issued analytics queries and exploiting the analytics query access patterns over the large distributed data-sets revealing the most interested and important sub-spaces for further exploratory analysis. By analysing user queries and respectively mapping them into relatively small-scale predictive local regression models, we can yield higher predictive accuracy. This is done by thinning the data space and freeing it of irrelevant and non-popular data sub-spaces; thus, making use of less training data instances. Experimental results and statistical analysis support the research idea proposed in this work.