2129781
ATLaS: A Native Extension of SQL for Data Mining
A lack of power and extensibility in their query languages has seriously limited the generality of DBMSs and hampered their ability to support new application domains. Considerable efforts by database researchers and commercial DBMS vendors have led to major extensions; yet there remain important applications—particularly data mining—that are not supported well in SQL-3. Thus, there is a pressing need for more general mechanisms for extending SQL and dealing with new application areas, particularly database-centric data mining. To satisfy this need, we allow database users to add new table functions and stream-oriented aggregate functions by defining them in SQL—rather than in external procedural languages as O-R DBMSs currently do. This simple extension turns SQL into a powerful database language, which can express a wide range of applications, including recursive queries, ROLAP aggregates, time-series queries, stream-oriented processing, and data mining functions. In addition to adding great power and flexibility to SQL, these extensions are conducive to performance and data independence. The paper also discusses the system we have developed to support these SQL extensions, and the architecture and techniques used in its realization.
2866284
BLINKS: ranked keyword searches on graphs
Query processing over graph-structured data is enjoying a growing number of applications. A top-k keyword search query on a graph finds the top k answers according to some ranking criteria, where each answer is a substructure of the graph containing all query keywords. Current techniques for supporting such queries on general graphs suffer from several drawbacks, e.g., poor worst-case performance, not taking full advantage of indexes, and high memory requirements. To address these problems, we propose BLINKS, a bi-level indexing and query processing scheme for top-k keyword search on graphs. BLINKS follows a search strategy with provable performance bounds, while additionally exploiting a bi-level index for pruning and accelerating the search. To reduce the index space, BLINKS partitions a data graph into blocks: The bi-level index stores summary information at the block level to initiate and guide search among blocks, and more detailed information for each block to accelerate search within blocks. Our experiments show that BLINKS offers orders-of-magnitude performance improvement over existing approaches.
2230972
Pruning and dynamic scheduling of cost-sensitive ensembles
Previous research has shown that averaging ensemble can scale up learning over very large cost-sensitive datasets with linear speedup independent of the learning algorithms. At the same time, it achieves the same or even better accuracy than a single model computed from the entire dataset. However, one major drawback is its inefficiency in prediction since every base model in the ensemble has to be consulted in order to produce a final prediction. In this paper, we propose several approaches to reduce the number of base classifiers. Among various methods explored, our empirical studies have shown that the benefit-based greedy approach can safely remove more than 90% of the base models while maintaining or even exceeding the prediction accuracy of the original ensemble. Assuming that each base classifier consumes one unit of prediction time, the removal of 90% of base classifiers translates to a prediction speedup of 10 times. On top of pruning, we propose a novel dynamic scheduling approach to further reduce the "expected" number of classifiers employed in prediction. It measures the confidence of a prediction by a subset of classifiers in the pruned ensemble. This confidence is used to decide if more classifiers are needed in order to produce a prediction that is the same as the original unpruned ensemble. This approach reduces the "expected" number of classifiers by another 25% to 75% without loss of accuracy.
12595576
Demand-driven frequent itemset mining using pattern structures
Frequent itemset mining aims at discovering patterns the supports of which are beyond a given threshold. In many applications, including network event management systems, which motivated this work, patterns are composed of items each described by a subset of attributes of a relational table. As it involves an exponential mining space, the efficient implementation of user preferences and mining constraints becomes the first priority for a mining algorithm. User preferences and mining constraints are often expressed using patterns’ attribute structures. Unlike traditional methods that mine all frequent patterns indiscriminately, we regard frequent itemset mining as a two-step process: the mining of the pattern structures and the mining of patterns within each pattern structure. In this paper, we present a novel architecture that uses pattern structures to organize the mining space. In comparison with the previous techniques, the advantage of our approach is two-fold: (i) by exploiting the interrelationships among pattern structures, execution times for mining can be reduced significantly; and (ii) more importantly, it enables us to incorporate high-level simple user preferences and mining constraints into the mining process efficiently. These advantages are demonstrated by our experiments using both synthetic and real-life datasets.
3479382
Semantic Data Management: Towards Querying Data with their Meaning
Relational database management systems are constantly being extended and augmented to accommodate data in different domains. Recently, with the increasing use of ontology in various applications, the need to support ontology, especially the related inferencing operation, in DBMS has become more concrete and urgent. However, manipulating knowledge along with relational data in DBMSs is not a trivial undertaking due to the mismatch in data models. In this paper, we introduce a framework for managing relational data and hierarchical domain knowledge together. Our framework persists taxonomies contained in ontologies by leveraging XML support in hybrid relational-XML DBMSs (e.g., IBM's DB2 v9) and rewrites ontology-based semantic matching queries using the industry-standard query languages, SQL/XML and XQuery. Compared with previous approaches, our approach does not materialize transitive closures of ontological relationships to support inferencing. Consequently, our method has wide applicability and good performance.
14048105
GString: A Novel Approach for Efficient Search in Graph Databases
Graphs are widely used for modeling complicated data, including chemical compounds, protein interactions, XML documents, and multimedia. Information retrieval against such data can be formulated as a graph search problem, and finding an efficient solution to the problem is essential for many applications. A popular approach is to represent both graphs and queries on graphs by sequences, thus converting graph search to subsequence matching. State-of-the-art sequencing methods work at the finest granularity - each node (or edge) in the graph will appear as an element in the resulting sequence. Clearly, such methods are not semantic conscious, and the resulting sequences are not only bulky but also prone to complexities arising from graph isomorphism and other problems in searching. In this paper, we introduce a novel sequencing method to capture the semantics of the underlying graph data. We find meaningful components in graph structures and use them as the most basic units in sequencing. It not only reduces the size of resulting sequences, but also enables semantic-based searching. In this paper, we base our approach on chemical compound databases, although it can be applied to searching other complicated graphs, such as protein structures. Experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art graph search methods.
9669585
Conceptual construction on incomplete survey data
The raw survey data for data mining are often incomplete. The issues of missing data in knowledge discovery are often ignored in data mining. This article presents the conceptual foundations of data mining with incomplete survey data, and proposes query processing for knowledge discovery and a set of query functions for the conceptual construction in survey data mining. Through a case, this paper demonstrates that conceptual construction on incomplete data can be accomplished by using artificial intelligence tools such as self-organizing maps.
15109806
Design of a next generation sampling service for large scale data analysis applications
Advances in data collection and storage technologies have resulted in large and dynamically growing data sets at many organizations. Database and data mining researchers often use sampling with great effect to scale up performance on these data sets with small cost to accuracy. However, existing techniques often ignore the cost of computing a sample. This cost is often linear in the size of the data set, not the sample, which is expensive. Furthermore, for data mining applications that leverage progressive sampling or bootstrapping-based techniques, this cost can be prohibitive, since they require the generation of multiple samples.To address this problem, we present a solution in the context of a state-of-the-art data analysis center. Specifically, we propose a scalable service that supports sample generation with cost linear in the size of the sample. We then present an efficient parallelization of this service. Our solution leverages high speed interconnects (e.g. Myrinet, Infini-band) for parallel I/O operations with pipelined data transfers. We export an interface that supports both ad-hoc SQL-like querying for database applications, as well as a stand-alone service for data mining applications. We then evaluate our work using queries abstracted from a network monitoring and analysis application, which uses both database and progressive sampling queries. We demonstrate that our implementation achieves good load balance and realizes up to an order of magnitude speedup when compared with extant approaches.
13221842
Rank-R approximation of tensors using image-as-matrix representation
We present a novel multilinear algebra based approach for reduced dimensionality representation of image ensembles. We treat an image as a matrix, instead of a vector as in traditional dimensionality reduction techniques like PCA, and higher-dimensional data as a tensor. This helps exploit spatio-temporal redundancies with less information loss than image-as-vector methods. The challenges lie in the computational and memory requirements for large ensembles. Currently, there exists a rank-R approximation algorithm which, although applicable to any number of dimensions, is efficient for only low-rank approximations. For larger dimensionality reductions, the memory and time costs of this algorithm become prohibitive. We propose a novel algorithm, for rank-R approximations of third-order tensors, which is efficient for arbitrary R but for the important special case of 2D image ensembles, e.g. video. Both of these algorithms reduce redundancies present in all dimensions. Rank-R tensor approximation yields the most compact data representation among all known image-as-matrix methods. We evaluated the performance of our algorithm vs. other approaches on a number of datasets with the following two main results. First, for a fixed compression ratio, the proposed algorithm yields the best representation of image ensembles visually as well as in the least squares sense. Second, proposed representation gives the best performance for object classification.
4379994
Interdomain Routing as Social Choice
Interdomain routing is essential to both the stability and efficiency of the global Internet. However, most previous studies focus only on stability, and only on a special class of routing protocols, namely BGP-type, path-vector protocols. In this paper, we conduct a systematic analysis of interdomain routing considering optimality and implementation in strategic settings. We adopt the novel perspective that an interdomain routing system is one which defines a social choice rule that aggregates individual preferences of all of the autonomous systems (ASes) in a network to select interdomain routes with a set of desirable properties. An interdomain routing protocol, then, is a mechanism to implement the identified interdomain routing social choice rule, when the ASes can adopt strategic actions. By pointing out the incompatibility among the desirable properties of an interdomain routing system and the requirements for strategic implementation in distributed settings, we reveal fundamental tradeoffs that must be made when extending BGP or designing the next-generation interdomain routing system. We also provide new insights into BGP, by "reverseengineering" its behaviors from the perspective of social choice and implementation theory.
17412122
Exploring Alternatives during Requirements Analysis
Goal-oriented requirements analysis techniques provide ways to refine organizational and technical objectives, to more effectively explore alternatives during requirements definition. After selecting a set of alternatives to achieve these objectives, you can elaborate on them during subsequent phases to make them more precise and complete. The authors argue that goal-oriented analysis complements and strengthens traditional requirements analysis techniques by offering a means for capturing and evaluating alternative ways of meeting business goals. They detail the five main steps that comprise goal-oriented analysis. These steps include goal analysis, softgoal analysis, softgoal correlation analysis, goal correlation analysis, and evaluation of alternatives. To illustrate the main elements of the proposed analysis technique, they explore a typical scenario that involves defining requirements for a meeting scheduling system.