230454
Mining Logs Files for Computing System Management
With advancement in science and technology, computing systems become increasingly more difficult to monitor, manage and maintain. Traditional approaches to system management have been largely based on domain experts through a knowledge acquisition process to translate domain knowledge into operating rules and policies. This has been experienced as a cumbersome, labor intensive, and error prone process. There is thus a pressing need for automatic and efficient approaches to monitor and manage complex computing systems. A popular approach to system management is based on analyzing system log files. However, several new aspects of the system log data have been less emphasized in existing analysis methods and posed several challenges. The aspects include disparate formats and relatively short text messages in data reporting, asynchronous data collection, and temporal characteristics in data representation. First, a typical computing system contains different devices with different software components, possibly from different providers. These various components have multiple ways to report events, conditions, errors and alerts. The heterogeneity and inconsistency of log formats make it difficult to automate problem determination. To perform automated analysis, we need to categorize the text messages with disparate formats into common situations. Second, text messages in the log files are relatively short with a large vocabulary size. Third, each text message usually contains a timestamp. The temporal characteristics provide additional context information of the messages and can be used to facilitate data analysis. In this paper, we apply text mining to automatically categorize the messages into a set of common categories, and propose two approaches of incorporating temporal information to improve the categorization performance
8864863
Integrating Features from Different Sources for Music Information Retrieval
Efficient and intelligent music information retrieval is a very important topic of the 21st century. With the ultimate goal of building personal music information retrieval systems, this paper studies the problem of identifying "similar" artists using both lyrics and acoustic data. In this paper, we present a clustering algorithm that integrates features from both sources to perform bimodal learning. The algorithm is tested on a data set consisting of 570 songs from 53 albums of 41 artists using artist similarity provided by All Music Guide. Experimental results show that the accuracy of artist similarity classifiers can be significantly improved and that artist similarity can be efficiently identified.
1750917
A general model for clustering binary data
Clustering is the problem of identifying the distribution of patterns and intrinsic correlations in large data sets by partitioning the data points into similarity classes. This paper studies the problem of clustering binary data. This is the case for market basket datasets where the transactions contain items and for document datasets where the documents contain "bag of words". The contribution of the paper is three-fold. First a general binary data clustering model is presented. The model treats the data and features equally, based on their symmetric association relations, and explicitly describes the data assignments as well as feature assignments. We characterize several variations with different optimization procedures for the general model. Second, we also establish the connections between our clustering model with other existing clustering methods. Third, we also discuss the problem for determining the number of clusters for binary clustering. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed clustering model.
14819927
Gene functional classification by semi-supervised learning from heterogeneous data
Gene function discovery is an important and interesting problem in computational analysis of microarray data. In this paper, we investigate the use of a semi-supervised learning algorithm for inferring gene functional classifications from heterogeneous data set consisting of DNA microarray expression measurements and phylogenetic profiles from whole-genome sequence compassions. The semisupervised learning approach aims at minimizing the disagreement between individual models built from each separate information source by employing a co-updating method and making use of both labeled and unlabeled data. Our results suggest that the semisupervised approach could be used for gene functional classification. The data sets and the program code used for the experiments can be accessed from our webpage.
9813108
CoFD : An Algorithm for Non-distance Based Clustering in High Dimensional Spaces
The clustering problem, which aims at identifying the distribution of patterns and intrinsic correlations in large data sets by partitioning the data points into similarity clusters, has been widely studied. Traditional clustering algorithms use distance functions to measure similarity and are not suitable for high dimensional spaces. In this paper, we propose CoFD algorithm, which is a non-distance based clustering algorithm for high dimensional spaces. Based on the maximum likelihood principle, CoFD is to optimize parameters to maximize the likelihood between data points and the model generated by the parameters. Experimental results on both synthetic data sets and a real data set show the efficiency and effectiveness of CoFD.
206784011
The Relationships Among Various Nonnegative Matrix Factorization Methods for Clustering
The nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) has been shown recently to be useful for clustering and various extensions and variations of NMF have been proposed recently. Despite significant research progress in this area, few attempts have been made to establish the connections between various factorization methods while highlighting their differences. In this paper we aim to provide a comprehensive study on matrix factorization for clustering. In particular, we present an overview and summary on various matrix factorization algorithms and theoretically analyze the relationships among them. Experiments are also conducted to empirically evaluate and compare various factorization methods. In addition, our study also answers several previously unaddressed yet important questions for matrix factorizations including the interpretation and normalization of cluster posterior and the benefits and evaluation of simultaneous clustering. We expect our study would provide good insights on matrix factorization research for clustering.
42024829
Strong consistency of the contraction mapping method for frequency estimation
Some statistical properties in regard to the contraction mapping (CM) method are discussed. One of the requirements in this method is that the filter be parameterized to satisfy a certain fundamental property. The parameterization clearly depends on the normalized noise spectrum which theoretically has to be known or estimated a priori. If this information is available, one can first whiten the noise with a linear filter and then apply the CM method to the filtered data. In this way, the parameterization only needs to be done under the white noise assumption and filters like the AR(2) can be used by the CM method. In applications, however, prewhitening may not always be necessary. >
14215995
Spin detection hardware for improved management of multithreaded systems
Spinning is a synchronization mechanism commonly used in applications and operating systems. Excessive spinning, however, often indicates performance or correctness (e.g., livelock) problems. Detecting if applications and operating systems are spinning is essential for achieving high performance, especially in consolidated servers running virtual machines. Prior research has used source or binary instrumentation to detect spinning. However, these approaches place a significant burden on programmers and may even be infeasible in certain situations. In this paper, we propose efficient hardware to detect spinning in unmodified applications and operating systems. Based on this hardware, we develop 1) scheduling and power policies that adaptively manage resources for spinning threads, 2) system support that helps detect when a multithreaded program is livelocked, and 3) hardware performance counters that accurately reflect system performance. Using full-system simulation with SPEC OMP, SPLASH-2, and Wisconsin commercial workloads, we demonstrate that our mechanisms effectively improve the management of multithreaded systems
6096323
Quantifying instruction criticality for shared memory multiprocessors
Recent research on processor microarchitecture suggests using instruction criticality as a metric to guide hardware control policies. Fields et al. [3, 4] have proposed a directed acyclic graph (DAG) model for characterizing program microexecutions on uniprocessors. Under such a model, critical path analysis can be applied and instructions' slack values can be used to quantify instruction criticality. In this paper, we extend the uniprocessor DAG model to characterize parallel program executions on shared memory multiprocessor systems. We describe how critical path analysis can be applied, at a fine grain, in a multiprocessor system running both finite and continuous workloads. We provide detailed evaluations for various aspects of multiprocessor executions under the DAG model. To enable efficient offline critical path analysis, we propose a novel graph reduction technique that reduces a DAG to an equivalent but significantly smaller DAG.
2949388
Optimal k-Anonymity with Flexible Generalization Schemes through Bottom-up Searching
In recent years, a major thread of research on k-anonymity has focused on developing more flexible generalization schemes that produce higher-quality datasets. In this paper we introduce three new generalization schemes that improve on existing schemes, as well as algorithms enumerating valid generalizations in these schemes. We also introduce a taxonomy for generalization schemes and a new cost metric for measuring information loss. We present a bottom-up search strategy for finding optimal anonymizations. This strategy works particularly well when the value of k is small. We show the feasibility of our approach through experiments on real census data
8716577
Blind identification and deconvolution of linear systems driven by binary random sequences
The problem of blind identification and deconvolution of linear systems with independent binary inputs is addressed. To solve the problem, a linear system is applied to the observed data and adjusted so as to produce binary outputs. It is proved that the system coincides with the inverse of the unknown system (with scale and shift ambiguities), whether it is minimum or nonminimum phase. These results are derived for nonstationary independent binary inputs of infinite or finite length. Based on these results, an identification method is proposed for parametric linear systems. It is shown that under some mild conditions, a consistent estimator of the parameter can be obtained by minimizing a binariness criterion for the output data. Unlike many other blind identification and deconvolution methods, this criterion handles nonstationary signals and does not utilize any moment information of the inputs. Three numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. >