2495453
A dual index model for contextual information retrieval
In this paper, we propose a dual index model for contextual IR. For each query, we search against both document level and passage level indexes, and use the corresponding merge function to update the weights for both documents and paragraphs by combining the results from both indexes according to the granularity information in metadata. Experiments on 2004 TREC data show that a significant improvement can be made by using the dual index model.
16574049
Feature Selection with Rough Sets for Web Page Classification
Web page classification is the problem of assigning predefined categories to web pages. A challenge in web page classification is how to deal with the high dimensionality of the feature space. We present a feature reduction method based on the rough set theory and investigate the effectiveness of the rough set feature selection method on web page classification. Our experiments indicate that rough set feature selection can improve the predictive performance when the original feature set for representing web pages is large.
41865724
Improved Image Coding with Classified VQ and Side-Match VQ
A new scheme for vector quantization (VQ) is proposed in this paper. We employ side-match and classified criteria for designing VQ codebooks to combat blocking effects induced from high compression rates, and then we use the proposed algorithm to improve the reconstructed image quality. Simulation results demonstrate the better image quality to compare with that produced from conventional schemes objectively and subjectively, at the cost of reasonable encoding complexity.
1232229
Active Mining of Data Streams
Most previously proposed mining methods on data streams make an unrealistic assumption that “labelled” data stream is readily available and can be mined at anytime. However, in most real-world problems, labelled data streams are rarely immediately available. Due to this reason, models are refreshed periodically, that is usually synchronized with data availability schedule. There are several undesirable consequences of this “passive periodic refresh”. In this paper, we propose a new concept of demand-driven active data mining. It estimates the error of the model on the new data stream without knowing the true class labels. When significantly higher error is suspected, it investigates the true class labels of a selected number of examples in the most recent data stream to verify the suspected higher error. 1 State-of-the-art Stream Mining State-of-the-art work on mining data streams concentrates on capturing time-evolving trends and patterns with “labeled” data. However, one important aspect that is often ignored or unrealistically assumed is the availability of “class labels” of data streams. Most algorithms make an implicit and impractical assumption that labeled data is readily available. Most works focus on how to detect the change in patterns and how to update the model to reflect such changes when there are “labelled” instances to be learned. However, for many applications, the class labels are not “immediately” available unless dedicated efforts and substantial costs are spent to investigate these labels right away. If the true class labels were readily available, data mining models would not be very useful we might just wait. In credit card fraud detection, we usually do not know if a particular transaction is a fraud until at least one month later after the account holder receives and reviews the monthly statement. Due to these facts, most current applications obtain class labels and update existing models in preset frequency, usually synchronized with data refresh. The effectiveness of the passive mode is dictated by some “statuary and static constraints”, yet not by the “demand” for a better model with a lower loss. Such a passive mode to mine data streams results in a number of potential undesirable consequences that contradict the notions of “streaming” and “continuous”. First, it may incur possibly higher loss due to neglected pattern drifts. If either the concept or data distribution drifts rapidly at an un-forecasted rate that statuary constraints do not catch up, the models are likely to be out-of-date on the data stream and important business opportunities might be missed. Second, it may have unnecessary model refresh. If there is neither conceptual nor distributional change, periodic passive model refresh and re-validation is a waste of resources. 1.1 Demand-driven Active Mining of Data Streams We are proposing a demand-driven active stream data mining process that solves the problems of passive stream data mining. As a summary, our particular implementation of active stream data mining has three simple steps: 1. Detect potential changes of data streams “on the fly” when the existing model classifies continuous data streams. The detection process does not use or know any true labels of the stream. One of the change detection methods is a “guess” of the actual loss or error rate of the model on the new data stream. 2. If the guessed loss or error rate of the model in step 1 is much higher than an application-specific tolerable maximum, we choose a small number of data records in the new data stream to investigate their true class labels. With these true class labels, we statistically estimate the true loss of the model. 3. If the statistically estimated loss in step 2 is verified to be higher than the tolerable maximum, we reconstruct the old model by using the same true class labels sampled in the previous step. In this paper, we concentrate on the first two steps. Our particular implementation extends on classification trees.
10038411
On personal data license design and negotiation
Web applications often require users to provide personal information for customization, identification, or completing a transaction. However, the way we disclose our information in current cyberspace does not allow us to control the usage, release and circulation of the information, violating the basic principle of personal information privacy. Online personal data licensing (OPDL) is a framework to bring the control of personal information back to individuals by requiring application and service providers to obtain a license from a person before collecting, processing, and using his personal information. In this paper we present the license design and automation of the license negotiation process.
6591350
Inferring Ongoing Activities of Workstation Users by Clustering Email
We are interested in automatically discovering the key ongoing activities of a workstation user, such as committees to which she belongs, writing projects in which she is involved, etc., based on the contents of her workstation. The thesis underlying our research is that this collection of user activities can be automatically inferred from the variety of data available on most users’ workstations, including their emails, files, online calendar, and history of web page accesses. Knowledge about the user's activities could be used in a variety of ways, such as cross-indexing email, calendar events, files, and web accesses according to activity, or automatically producing a 'briefing folder' for each meeting on the user's calendar. We describe here our initial research on inferring such activities by examining only the user's email. In particular, we describe a variety of unsupervised clustering methods designed for clustering emails by user activity, and the use of information extractors and pretrained classifiers to infer additional information about each discovered cluster. Experimental results are presented for emails from three users.
18171732
Data Placement in Intermittently Available Environments
In this paper, we address the problem of data placement in a grid based multimedia environment, where the resource providers, i.e. servers, are intermittently available. The goal is to optimize the system performance by admitting maximum number of users into the system while ensuring user Quality of Service (QoS). We define and formulate various placement strategies that determine the degree of replication necessary for video objects by using a cost-based optimization procedure based on predictions of expected requests under various time-map scenarios and QoS demands. We also devise methods for dereplication of videos based on changes in popularity and server usage patterns. Our performance results indicate the benefits obtained the judicious use of dynamic placement strategies.