14616525
Some Formal Analysis of Rocchio's Similarity-Based Relevance Feedback Algorithm
Rocchio's similarity-based Relevance feedback algorithm, one of the most important query reformation methods in information retrieval, is essentially an adaptive supervised learning algorithm from examples. In spite of its popularity in various applications there is little rigorous analysis of its learning complexity in literature. In this paper we show that in the binary vector space model, if the initial query vector is 0, then for any of the four typical similarities (inner product, dice coefficient, cosine coefficient, and Jaccard coefficient), Rocchio's similarity-based relevance feedback algorithm makes at least n mistakes when used to search for a collection of documents represented by a monotone disjunction of at most k relevant features (or terms) over the n-dimensional binary vector space {0, 1}n. When an arbitrary initial query vector in {0, 1}n is used, it makes at least (n + k − 3)/2 mistakes to search for the same collection of documents. The linear lower bounds are independent of the choices of the threshold and coefficients that the algorithm may use in updating its query vector and making its classification.
44651708
Personalized Web Search with Clusters
140623
Optimal Algorithms for Finding User Access Sessions from Very Large Web Logs
Although efficient identification of user access sessions from very large web logs is an unavoidable data preparation task for the success of higher level web log mining, little attention has been paid to algorithmic study of this problem. In this paper we consider two types of user access sessions, interval sessions and gap sessions. We design two efficient algorithms for finding respectively those two types of sessions with the help of some proposed structures. We present theoretical analysis of the algorithms and prove that both algorithms have optimal time complexity and certain error-tolerant properties as well. We conduct empirical performance analysis of the algorithms with web logs ranging from 100 megabytes to 500 megabytes. The empirical analysis shows that the algorithms just take several seconds more than the baseline time, i.e., the time needed for reading the web log once sequentially from disk to RAM, testing whether each user access record is valid or not, and writing each valid user access record back to disk. The empirical analysis also shows that our algorithms are substantially faster than the sorting based session finding algorithms. Finally, optimal algorithms for finding user access sessions from distributed web logs are also presented.
5722664
A Visualization System using Data Mining Techniques for Identifying Information Sources
The Visual Analysis System (VAS) was developed to couple emerging successes in data mining with information visualization techniques in order to create a richly interactive environment for information retrieval from the World Wide Web. VAS's retrieval strategy operates by first using a conventional search engine to form a core set,of retrieved documents. This core set is expanded by crawling from links in these documents to form a much larger set. The link topology of the larger set is then examined using data mining techniques to identify pages likely to be both relevant to the query and reliable as sources of information. Information visualization techniques are used to display the filtered set in a form amenable to the use of perceptual processes to filter and guide further user directed search. (Contains 16 references.) (MES) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. N tr) 00 7171A Visualization System using Data Mining Techniques for Identifying Information Sources Richard H. Fowler, Tarkan Karadayi, Zhixiang Chen, Xiannong Meng, Wendy A. Lawrence Fowler Department of Computer Science University of Texas Pan American United States {fowler, tkaradayi, chen, meng, wfowler @panam.edu} PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE AND DISSEMINATE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY
7399730
An Almost Linear Time 2.8334-Approximation Algorithm for the Disc Covering Problem
The disc covering problem asks to cover a set of points on the plane with a minimum number of fix-sized discs. We develop an O(n(logn)2(loglogn)2) deterministic time 2.8334-approximation algorithm for this problem. Previous approximation algorithms [7,3,6], when used to achieve the same approximation ratio for the disc covering problem, will have much higher time complexity than our algorithms.
14422953
On-line learning of rectangles
This paper solves the following open problem: Is there an algorithmfor on-line learning of rectangles <inline-equation><f><pr align="c"><ll>i=1</ll><ul>d</ul></pr></f><?Pub Caret></inline-equation><?Pub Fmt italic>a<subscrpt>i</subscrpt>,a<subscrpt>i</subscrpt>+1,…,b<subscrpt>i</subscrpt>}<?Pub Fmt /italic>over a discrete domain<?Pub Fmt italic>{1,…,n}<supscrpt>d</supscrpt><?Pub Fmt /italic>whose error bound is polylogarithmic in the size<?Pub Fmt italic>n<supscrpt>d</supscrpt><?Pub Fmt /italic> of the domain(i.e. polynomial in <?Pub Fmt italic>d<?Pub Fmt /italic> and log<?Pub Fmt italic>n<?Pub Fmt /italic> )? We give a positive solution byintroducing a new design technique that appears to be of some intereston its own. The new learning algorithm for rectangles consists of<?Pub Fmt italic>2d<?Pub Fmt /italic> separate search strategies thatsearch for the parameters <?Pub Fmt italic>a<subscrpt>1</subscrpt>,b<subscrpt>1</subscrpt>,…,a<subscrpt>d</subscrpt>,b<subscrpt>d</subscrpt><?Pub Fmt /italic>of the target rectangle. A learning algorithm with this type of modulardesign ends to fail because of the well known “credit assignmentproblem”: Which of the <?Pub Fmt italic>2d<?Pub Fmt /italic> localsearch strategies should be “blamed” when the globalalgorithm makes an error? We overcome this difficulty by employing localsearch strategies (“error tolerant binary search”) that areable to tolerate certain types of wrong credit assignments.
Section 4 contains another application of this design technique: analgorithm for learning the union of two rectangles in the plane.
32847785
Approximation Algorithms for Independent Sets in Map Graphs
This paper presents polynomial-time approximation algorithms for the problem of computing a maximum independent set in a given map graph G with or without weights on its vertices. If G is given together with a map, then a ratio of 1+? can be achieved by a quadratic-time algorithm for any given constant ??0, no matter whether each vertex of G is given a weight or not. In case G is given without a map, a ratio of 4 can be achieved by a low-degree polynomial-time algorithm if no vertex is given a weight, while a ratio of 5 can be achieved by a low-degree polynomial-time algorithm otherwise.
15310025
A study of relevance propagation for web search
Different from traditional information retrieval, both content and structure are critical to the success of Web information retrieval. In recent years, many relevance propagation techniques have been proposed to propagate content information between web pages through web structure to improve the performance of web search. In this paper, we first propose a generic relevance propagation framework, and then provide a comparison study on the effectiveness and efficiency of various representative propagation models that can be derived from this generic framework. We come to many conclusions that are useful for selecting a propagation model in real-world search applications, including 1) sitemap-based propagation models outperform hyperlink-based models in sense of both effectiveness and efficiency, and 2) sitemap-based term propagation is easier to be integrated into real-world search engines because of its parallel offline implementation and acceptable complexity. Some other more detailed study results are also reported in the paper.
4216648
Optimizing web search using web click-through data
The performance of web search engines may often deteriorate due to the diversity and noisy information contained within web pages. User click-through data can be used to introduce more accurate description (metadata) for web pages, and to improve the search performance. However, noise and incompleteness, sparseness, and the volatility of web pages and queries are three major challenges for research work on user click-through log mining. In this paper, we propose a novel iterative reinforced algorithm to utilize the user click-through data to improve search performance. The algorithm fully explores the interrelations between queries and web pages, and effectively finds "virtual queries" for web pages and overcomes the challenges discussed above. Experiment results on a large set of MSN click-through log data show a significant improvement on search performance over the naive query log mining algorithm as well as the baseline search engine.
7094764
A unified framework for Web link analysis
Web link analysis has been proved to significantly enhance the precision of Web searching in practice. Among existing approaches, Kleinberg's (1998) HITS and Google's PageRank are the two most representative algorithms that employ explicit hyperlink structure among Web pages to conduct link analysis, and DirectHit represents the other extreme that takes the user's access frequency as an implicit link to the Web page for assessing its importance. We propose a novel link analysis algorithm which puts both explicit and implicit link structures under a unified framework, and show that HITS and DirectHit are essentially two extreme instances of our proposed method. One important advantage of our method is its ability to analyze not only the hyperlinks between Web pages but also the interactions between users and the Web at the same time. The importance of Web pages and users can reinforce each other to improve Web link analysis. Compared with traditional HITS and DirectHit algorithms, our method further improves the search precision by 11.8% and 25.3%.
7997128
Exploiting the hierarchical structure for link analysis
Link analysis algorithms have been extensively used in Web information retrieval. However, current link analysis algorithms generally work on a flat link graph, ignoring the hierarchal structure of the Web graph. They often suffer from two problems: the sparsity of link graph and biased ranking of newly-emerging pages. In this paper, we propose a novel ranking algorithm called Hierarchical Rank as a solution to these two problems, which considers both the hierarchical structure and the link structure of the Web. In this algorithm, Web pages are first aggregated based on their hierarchical structure at directory, host or domain level and link analysis is performed on the aggregated graph. Then, the importance of each node on the aggregated graph is distributed to individual pages belong to the node based on the hierarchical structure. This algorithm allows the importance of linked Web pages to be distributed in the Web page space even when the space is sparse and contains new pages. Experimental results on the .GOV collection of TREC 2003 and 2004 show that hierarchical ranking algorithm consistently outperforms other well-known ranking algorithms, including the PageRank, BlockRank and LayerRank. In addition, experimental results show that link aggregation at the host level is much better than link aggregation at either the domain or directory levels.