8216205
Dissimilarity learning for nominal data
Defining a good distance (dissimilarity) measure between patterns is of crucial importance in many classification and clustering algorithms. While a lot of work has been performed on continuous attributes, nominal attributes are more difficult to handle. A popular approach is to use the value difference metric (VDM) to define a real-valued distance measure on nominal values. However, VDM treats the attributes separately and ignores any possible interactions among attributes. In this paper, we propose the use of adaptive dissimilarity matrices for measuring the dissimilarities between nominal values. These matrices are learned via optimizing an error function on the training samples. Experimental results show that this approach leads to better classification performance. Moreover, it also allows easier interpretation of (dis)similarity between different nominal values.
29013572
Semi-supervised Learning in Medical Image Database
This paper presents a novel graph-based algorithm for solving the semi-supervised learning problem. The graph-based algorithm makes use of the recent advances in stochastic graph sampling technqiue and a modeling of the labeling consistency in semi-supervised learning. The quality of the algorithm is empirically evaluated on a synthetic clustering problem. The semi-supervised clustering is also applied to the problem of symptoms classification in medical image database and shows promising results.
46337154
Minimum cross entropy thresholding
Abstract The threshold selection problem is solved by minimizing the cross entropy between the image and its segmented version. The cross entropy is formulated in a pixel-to-pixel basis between the two images and a computationally attractive algorithm employing the histogram is developed. Without making a priori assumptions about the population distribution, this method provides an unbiased estimate of a binarized version of the image in an information theoretic sense.
268452
Query planning with limited source capabilities
In information-integration systems, sources may have diverse and limited query capabilities. We show that because sources have restrictions on retrieving their information, sources not mentioned in a query can contribute to the query result by providing useful bindings. In some cases we can access sources repeatedly to retrieve bindings to answer a query, and query planning thus becomes considerably more challenging. We find all the obtainable answers to a query by translating the query and source descriptions to a simple recursive Datalog program, and evaluating the program on the source relations. This program often accesses sources that are not in the query. Some of these accesses are essential, as they provide bindings that let us query sources, which we could not do otherwise. However, some of these accesses can be proven not to add anything to the query's answer. We show in which cases these off-query accesses are useless, and prove that in these cases we can compute the complete answer to the query by using only the sources in the query. In the cases where off-query accesses are necessary, we propose an algorithm for finding all the useful sources for a query. We thus solve the optimization problem of eliminating the unnecessary source accesses, and optimize the program to answer the query.
19589601
Single machine scheduling to minimize total compression plus weighted flow cost is NP-hard
Abstract This article analyzes the computational complexity of a single machine scheduling problem to minimize total compression plus weighted flow cost. Vickson [Oper. Res. 28 (1980) 1155–1167] studied this problem and conjectured that it was NP-hard. The complexity of this problem remained open since then. We give a positive answer to this conjecture, showing that this problem is NP-hard.
17330404
A supervised visual wrapper generator for Web-data extraction
Extracting data from Web pages using wrappers is a fundamental problem arising in a large variety of applications of vast practical interest. In this paper, we propose a novel schema-guided approach to wrapper generation. We provide a user-friendly interface that allows users to define the schema of the data to be extracted, and specifies mappings from a HTML page to the target schema. Based on the mappings, the system can automatically generate an extraction rule to extract data from the page. Our approach to wrapper generation can significantly reduce the work of human beings in this process. And the user never has to deal with the internal extraction rule, or even familiarity with the details of HTML.
10581413
Answering queries with useful bindings
In information-integration systems, sources may have diverse and limited query capabilities. To obtain maximum information from these restrictive sources to answer a query, one can access sources that are not specified in the query (i.e., off-query sources). In this article, we propose a query-planning framework to answer queries in the presence of limited access patterns. In the framework, a query and source descriptions are translated to a recursive datalog program. We then solve optimization problems in this framework, including how to decide whether accessing off-query sources is necessary, how to choose useful sources for a query, and how to test query containment. We develop algorithms to solve these problems, and thus construct an efficient program to answer a query.
3069881
Indexing Mixed Types for Approximate Retrieval
In various applications such as data cleansing, being able to retrieve categorical or numerical attributes based on notions of approximate match (e.g., edit distance, numerical distance) is of profound importance. Commonly, approximate match predicates are specified on combinations of attributes in conjunction. Existing database techniques for approximate retrieval, however, limit their applicability to single attribute retrieval through B-trees and their variants. In this paper, we propose a methodology that utilizes known multidimensional indexing structures for the problem of approximate multi-attribute retrieval. Our method enables indexing of a collection of string and/or numeric attributes to facilitate approximate retrieval using edit distance as an approximate match predicate for strings and numeric distance for numeric attributes. The approach presented is based on representing sets of strings at higher levels of the index structure as tries suitably compressed in a way that reasoning about edit distance between a query string and a compressed trie at index nodes is still feasible. We propose and evaluate various techniques to generate the compressed trie representation and fully specify our indexing methodology. Our experimental results show the benefits of our proposal when compared with various alternate strategies for the same problem.