46834678
Efficient Search of Reliable Exceptions
Finding patterns from data sets is a fundamental task of data mining. If we categorize all patterns into strong, weak, and random, conventional data mining techniques are designed only to find strong patterns, which hold for numerous objects and are usually consistent with the expectations of experts. While such strong patterns are helpful in prediction, the unexpectedness and contradiction exhibited by weak patterns are also very useful although they represent a relatively small number of objects. In this paper, we address the problem of finding weak patterns (i.e., reliable exceptions) from databases. A simple and efficient approach is proposed which uses deviation analysis to identify interesting exceptions and explore reliable ones. Besides, it is flexible in handling both subjective and objective exceptions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach through a set of real-life data sets, and present interesting findings.
14543078
Resource description framework: metadata and its applications
Universality, the property of the Web that makes it the largest data and information source in the world, is also the property behind the lack of a uniform organization scheme that would allow easy access to data and information. A semantic web, wherein different applications and Web sites can exchange information and hence exploit Web data and information to their full potential, requires the information about Web resources to be represented in a detailed and structured manner. Resource Description Framework (RDF), an effort in this direction supported by the World Wide Web Consortium, provides a means for the description of metadata which is a necessity for the next generation of interoperable Web applications. The success of RDF and the semantic web will depend on (1) the development of applications that prove the applicability of the concept, (2) the availability of application interfaces which enable the development of such applications, and (3) databases and inference systems that exploit RDF to identify and locate most relevant Web resources. In addition, many practical issues, such as security, ease of use, and compatibility, will be crucial in the success of RDF. This survey aims at providing a glimpse at the past, present, and future of this upcoming technology and highlights why we believe that the next generation of the Web will be more organized, informative, searchable, accessible, and, most importantly, useful. It is expected that knowledge discovery and data mining can benefit from RDF and the Semantic Web.
5365583
NeuroRule: A Connectionist Approach to Data Mining
Classification, which involves finding rules that partition a given da.ta set into disjoint groups, is one class of data mining problems. Approaches proposed so far for mining classification rules for large databases are mainly decision tree based symbolic learning methods. The connectionist approach based on neura.l networks has been thought not well suited for data mining. One of the major reasons cited is that knowledge generated by neural networks is not explicitly represented in the form of rules suitable for verification or interpretation by humans. This paper examines this issue. With our newly developed algorithms, rules which are similar to, or more concise than those generated by the symbolic methods can be extracted from the neural networks. The data mining process using neural networks with the emphasis on rule extraction is described. ExperimenM results and comparison with previously published works are presented.
16386059
A Monotonic Measure for Optimal Feature Selection
Feature selection is a problem of choosing a subset of relevant features. In general, only exhaustive search can bring about the optimal subset. With a monotonic measure, exhaustive search can be avoided without sacrificing optimality. Unfortunately, most error- or distancebased measures are not monotonic. A new measure is employed in this work that is monotonic and fast to compute. The search for relevant features according to this measure is guaranteed to be complete but not exhaustive. Experiments are conducted for verification.
46794790
Analysis of Hidden Representations by Greedy Clustering
The hidden layer of backpropagation neural networks (NNs) holds the key to the networks' success in solving pattern classification problems. The units in the hidden layer encapsulate the network's internal representations of the outside world described by the input data. this paper, the hidden representations of trained networks are investigated by means simple greedy clustering algorithm. This clustering algorithm is applied to networks have been trained to solve well-known problems: the monks problems, the 5-bit problem and the contiguity problem. The results from applying the algorithm to problems with known concepts provide us with a better understanding of NN learning. These also explain why NNs achieve higher predictive accuracy than that of decision-tree methods. The results of this study can be readily applied to rule extraction from Production rules are extracted for the parity and the monks problems, as well as benchmark data set: Pima Indian diabetes diagnosis. The extracted rules from the Indi...
16781216
Fast hierarchical clustering and its validation
Clustering is the task of grouping similar objects into clusters. A prominent and useful class of algorithm is hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC) which iteratively agglomerates the closest pair until all data points belong to one cluster. It outputs a dendrogram showing all N levels of agglomerations where N is the number of objects in the dataset. However, HAC methods have several drawbacks: (1) high time and memory complexities for clustering, and (2) inefficient and inaccurate cluster validation. In this paper we show that these drawbacks can be alleviated by closely studying the dendrogram. Empirical study shows that most HAC algorithms follow a trend where, except for a number of top levels of the dendrogram, all lower levels agglomerate clusters which are very small in size and close in proximity to other clusters. Methods are proposed that exploit this characteristic to reduce the time and memory complexities significantly and to make validation very efficient and accurate. Analyses and experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed method.
9642703
Discovering typical structures of documents: a road map approach
The structure of a document refers to the role and hierarchy of subdocument references. Many online documents are similarly structured, though not identically structured. We study the problem of discovering “typical” structures of a collection of such documents, where the user specifies the minimum frequency of a typical structure. We will consider structural features of subdocument references such as labeling, nesting, ordering, cyclicity, and wild-card references, like those found on the Web and digital libraries. Typical structures can be used to serve the following purposes. (a) The “table-ofcontent” for gaining the general information of a source. (b) A road map for browsing and querying a source. (c) A basis for clustering documents. (d) Partial schemas for building structured layers to provide standard database access methods. (e) User/customer’s interests and browsing patterns. We present a solution to the discovery problem.
6969845
Real-time Application Monitoring and Diagnosis for Service Hosting Platforms of Black Boxes
Service hosting platforms typically run a large number of third-party applications that are composed of multiple communicating components distributed on a dynamic set of hosting servers. Understanding the real-time behaviors of these applications and the intricate interactions/dependency relationships among these application components is very important to service management tasks such as load balancing, capacity planning, performance debugging and fault diagnosis. In this paper, we present the scalable real-time application monitoring and diagnosis (SRAMD) tool, for applications consisting of "black box" components: software without source code available, and usually without desired logging instrumentation. SRAMD runs at application layer and requires no modification to existing applications, middleware, or messages. For each application component collocated at its hosting server, a SRAMD monitor traces the component's packet-level traffic unobtrusively, summarizes its local resource utilization and performance (e.g. response time) online, performs interactive queries (e.g. per- request resource utilization) to locate possible bottlenecks on- demand, and discovers inter-component dependence relationships statistically. The SRAMD controller simply aggregates reports from distributed monitors to construct real-time application topologies with rich runtime information. We have developed mechanisms to decentralize the computation overhead and minimize the communication cost in the monitoring and diagnosis process, and two schemes to discover application component dependency relationships in different scenarios. The SRAMD tool offers an alternative to server logs and message-level traces for service monitoring and performance diagnosis.
17890414
Identifying significant genes from microarray data
Microarray technology is a recent development in experimental molecular biology which can produce quantitative expression measurements for thousands of genes in a single, cellular mRNA sample. These many gene expression measurements form a composite profile of the sample, which can be used to differentiate samples from different classes such as tissue types or treatments. However, for the gene expression profile data obtained in a specific comparison, most likely only some of the genes will, be differentially expressed between the classes, while many other genes have similar expression levels. Selecting a list of informative differential genes from these data is important for microarray data analysis. In this paper, we describe a framework for selecting informative genes, called ranking and combination analysis (RAC), which combines various existing informative gene selection methods. We conducted experiments using three data sets and six existing feature selection methods. The results show that the RAC framework is a robust and efficient approach to identify informative gene for microarray data. The combination approach on two selecting methods almost always performed better than the less efficient individual, and in many cases, better than both. More significantly, when considering all three data sets together, the combination approach, on average, outperforms each individual feature selection method. All of these indicate that RCA might be a viable and feasible approach for the microarray gene expression analysis.
6076549
Executable JVM model for analytical reasoning: a study
To study the properties of the Java Virtual Machine(JVM) and Java programs, our research group has produced a series of JVM models written in a functional subset of Common Lisp. In this paper, we present our most complete JVM model from this series, namely, M6, which is derived from a careful study of the J2ME KVM [16] implementation.On the one hand, our JVM model is a conventional machine emulator. M6 models accurately almost all aspects of the KVM implementation, including the dynamic class loading, class initialization and synchronization via monitors. It executes most J2ME Java programs that do not use any I/O or floating point operations. Engineers may consider M6 an implementation of the JVM. It is implemented with around 10K lines in 20+ modules.On the other hand, M6 is a novel model that allows for analytical reasoning besides conventional testing. M6 is written in an applicative (side-effect free) subset of Common Lisp, for which we have given precise meaning in terms of axioms and inference rules. A property of M6 can be expressed as a formula. Rules of interference can be used analytically to derive properties of M6 and the Java programs that run on the model, using a mechanical theorem prover.We argue that our approach of building an executable model of the system with an axiomatically described functional language can bring benefits from both the testing and the formal reasoning worlds.
17120587
Combination methods in microarray analysis
Microarray technology and experiment can produce thousands or tens of thousands of gene expression measurements in a single cellular mRNA sample. Selecting a list of informative differential genes from these measurement data has been the central problem for microarray analysis. Many methods to identify informative genes have been proposed in the past. However, due to the complexity of biological systems, each proposed method seems to perform nicely in a particular data set or specific experiment. It remains a great challenge to come up with a selection method for a wider spectrum of experiments and a broader variety of data sets. In this paper, we take the approach of method combination using data fusion and rank-score graph which have been used successfully in other application domains such as information retrieval, pattern recognition and tracking, and molecular similarity search. Our method combination is efficient and flexible and can be extended to become a general learning system for microarray gene expression analysis.