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With the proliferation of spatial-textual data such as location-based services and geo-tagged websites, spatial keyword queries are ubiquitous in real life. One example of spatial-keyword query is the so-called collective spatial keyword query (CoSKQ) which is to find for a given query consisting a query location and several query keywords a set of objects which covers the query keywords collectively and has the smallest cost wrt the query location. In the literature, many different functions were proposed for defining the ${cost}$ and correspondingly, many different approaches were developed for the CoSKQ problem. In this paper, we study the CoSKQ problem systematically by proposing a unified cost function and a unified approach for the CoSKQ problem (with the unified cost function). The unified cost function includes all existing cost functions as special cases and the unified approach solves the CoSKQ problem with the unified cost function in a unified way. Experiments were conducted on both real and synthetic datasets which verified our proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new density-based clustering algorithm, RNN-DBSCAN, is presented which uses reverse nearest neighbor counts as an estimate of observation density. Clustering is performed using a DBSCAN-like approach based on $k$ nearest neighbor graph traversals through dense observations. RNN-DBSCAN is preferable to the popular density-based clustering algorithm DBSCAN in two aspects. First, problem complexity is reduced to the use of a single parameter (choice of $k$ nearest neighbors), and second, an improved ability for handling large variations in cluster density (heterogeneous density). The superiority of RNN-DBSCAN is demonstrated on several artificial and real-world datasets with respect to prior work on reverse nearest neighbor based clustering approaches (RECORD, IS-DBSCAN, and ISB-DBSCAN) along with DBSCAN and OPTICS. Each of these clustering approaches is described by a common graph-based interpretation wherein clusters of dense observations are defined as connected components, along with a discussion on their computational complexity. Heuristics for RNN-DBSCAN parameter selection are presented, and the effects of $k$ on RNN-DBSCAN clusterings discussed. Additionally, with respect to scalability, an approximate version of RNN-DBSCAN is presented leveraging an existing approximate $k$ nearest neighbor technique. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The problem of deriving lower and upper bounds for the edit distance between undirected, labeled graphs has recently received increasing attention. However, only one algorithm has been proposed that allegedly computes not only an upper but also a lower bound for non-uniform edit costs and incorporates information about both node and edge labels. In this paper, we demonstrate that this algorithm is incorrect. We present a corrected version \mathsf B\scriptstyleRANCH that runs in \mathcalO(n^2\Delta ^3+n^3) time, where \Delta is the maximum of the maximum degrees of input graphs G and H . We also develop a speed-up that runs in \mathcal{O}(n^2\Delta ^2+n^3) time and computes an only slightly less accurate lower bound. The lower bounds produced by \mathsf B\scriptstyleRANCH and \mathsf {B\scriptstyle{RANCH}}\mathsf{F\scriptstyle{AST}} are shown to be pseudo-metrics on a collection of graphs. Finally, we suggest an anytime algorithm \mathsf B\scriptstyleRANCH\mathsfT\scriptstyleIGHT that iteratively improves \mathsf B\scriptstyleRANCH ’s lower bound. \mathsf B\scriptstyleRANCH\mathsfT\scriptstyleIGHT runs in \mathcalO(n^3\Delta ^2+I(n^2\Delta ^3+n^3)) time, where the number of iterations $I$ is controlled by the user. A detailed experimental evaluation shows that all suggested algorithms are Pareto optimal, that they are very effective when used as filters for edit distance range queries, and that they perform excellently when used within classification frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is the problem of determining two non-negative low rank factors \mathbfW and \mathbfH , for the given input matrix \mathbfA , such that \mathbfA\approx \mathbfW\mathbfH . NMF is a useful tool for many applications in different domains such as topic modeling in text mining, background separation in video analysis, and community detection in social networks. Despite its popularity in the data mining community, there is a lack of efficient parallel algorithms to solve the problem for big data sets. The main contribution of this work is a new, high-performance parallel computational framework for a broad class of NMF algorithms that iteratively solves alternating non-negative least squares (NLS) subproblems for \mathbfW and \mathbfH . It maintains the data and factor matrices in memory (distributed across processors), uses MPI for interprocessor communication, and, in the dense case, provably minimizes communication costs (under mild assumptions). The framework is flexible and able to leverage a variety of NMF and NLS algorithms, including Multiplicative Update, Hierarchical Alternating Least Squares, and Block Principal Pivoting. Our implementation allows us to benchmark and compare different algorithms on massive dense and sparse data matrices of size that spans from few hundreds of millions to billions. We demonstrate the scalability of our algorithm and compare it with baseline implementations, showing significant performance improvements. The code and the datasets used for conducting the experiments are available online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-Task Learning (MTL) can enhance a classifier’s generalization performance by learning multiple related tasks simultaneously. Conventional MTL works under the offline or batch setting, and suffers from expensive training cost and poor scalability. To address such inefficiency issues, online learning techniques have been applied to solve MTL problems. However, most existing algorithms of online MTL constrain task relatedness into a presumed structure via a single weight matrix, which is a strict restriction that does not always hold in practice. In this paper, we propose a robust online MTL framework that overcomes this restriction by decomposing the weight matrix into two components: The first one captures the low-rank common structure among tasks via a nuclear norm and the second one identifies the personalized patterns of outlier tasks via a group lasso. Theoretical analysis shows the proposed algorithm can achieve a sub-linear regret with respect to the best linear model in hindsight. Even though the above framework achieves good performance, the nuclear norm that simply adds all nonzero singular values together may not be a good low-rank approximation. To improve the results, we use a log-determinant function as a non-convex rank approximation. The gradient scheme is applied to optimize log-determinant function and can obtain a closed-form solution for this refined problem. Experimental results on a number of real-world applications verify the efficacy of our method. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In many applications, top-k dominating query is an important operation to return k tuples with the highest domination scores in a potentially huge data space. It is analyzed that the existing algorithms have their performance problems when performed on massive data. This paper proposes a novel table-scan-based TDTS algorithm to efficiently compute top-k dominating results. TDTS first presorts the table for early termination. The early termination checking is proposed in this paper, along with the theoretical analysis of scan depth. The pruning operation for tuples is devised in this paper. The theoretical pruning effect shows that the number of tuples maintained in TDTS can be reduced substantially. The extensive experimental results, conducted on synthetic and real-life data sets, show that TDTS outperforms the existing algorithms significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Locality sensitive hashing (LSH) is an efficient method for solving the problem of approximate similarity search in high-dimensional spaces. Through LSH, a high-dimensional similarity join can be processed in the same way as hash join, making the cost of joining two large datasets linear. By judicially analyzing the properties of multiple LSH algorithms, we propose a generic method to speed up the process of joining two large datasets using LSH. The crux of our method lies in the way which we identify a set of representative points to reduce the number of LSH lookups. Theoretical analyzes show that our proposed method can greatly reduce the number of lookup operations and retain the same result accuracy compared to executing LSH lookups for every query point. Furthermore, we demonstrate the generality of our method by showing that the same principle can be applied to LSH algorithms for three different metrics: the Euclidean distance (QALSH), Jaccard similarity measure (MinHash), and Hamming distance (sequence hashing). Results from experimental studies using real datasets confirm our error analyzes and show significant improvements of our method over the state-of-the-art LSH method: to achieve over 0.95 recall, we only need to operate LSH lookups for at most 15 percent of the query points. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As both social network structure and strength of influence between individuals evolve constantly, it requires tracking the influential nodes under a dynamic setting. To address this problem, we explore the Influential Node Tracking (INT) problem as an extension to the traditional Influence Maximization problem (IM) under dynamic social networks. While the Influence Maximization problem aims at identifying a set of $k$ nodes to maximize the joint influence under one static network, the INT problem focuses on tracking a set of influential nodes that keeps maximizing the influence as the network evolves. Utilizing the smoothness of the evolution of the network structure, we propose an efficient algorithm, Upper Bound Interchange Greedy (UBI) and a variant, UBI+. Instead of constructing the seed set from the ground, we start from the influential seed set we found previously and implement node replacement to improve the influence coverage. Furthermore, by using a fast update method by calculating the marginal gain of nodes, our algorithm can scale to dynamic social networks with millions of nodes. Empirical experiments on three real large-scale dynamic social networks show that our UBI and its variants, UBI+ achieves better performance in terms of both influence coverage and running time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Density Peaks (DP) is a recently proposed clustering algorithm that has distinctive advantages over existing clustering algorithms. It has already been used in a wide range of applications. However, DP requires computing the distance between every pair of input points, therefore incurring quadratic computation overhead, which is prohibitive for large data sets. In this paper, we study efficient distributed algorithms for DP. We first show that a naïve MapReduce solution (Basic-DDP) has high communication and computation overhead. Then, we propose LSH-DDP, an approximate algorithm that exploits Locality Sensitive Hashing for partitioning data, performs local computation, and aggregates local results to approximate the final results. We address several challenges in employing LSH for DP. We leverage the characteristics of DP to deal with the fact that some of the result values cannot be directly approximated in local partitions. We present formal analysis of LSH-DDP, and show that the approximation quality and the runtime can be controlled by tuning the parameters of LSH-DDP. Experimental results on both a local cluster and EC2 show that LSH-DDP achieves a factor of 1.7–70x speedup over the naïve Basic-DDP and 2x speedup over the state-of-the-art EDDPC approach, while returning comparable cluster results. Compared to the popular K-means clustering, LSH-DDP also has comparable or better performance. Furthermore, LSH-DDP could achieve even higher efficiency with a lower accuracy requirement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While both cost-sensitive learning and online learning have been studied separately, these two issues have seldom been addressed simultaneously. Yet, there are many applications where both aspects are important. This paper investigates a class of algorithmic approaches suitable for online cost-sensitive learning, designed for such problems. The basic idea is to leverage existing methods for online ensemble algorithms, and combine these with batch mode methods for cost-sensitive bagging/boosting algorithms. Within this framework, we describe several theoretically sound online cost-sensitive bagging and online cost-sensitive boosting algorithms, and show that the convergence of the proposed algorithms is guaranteed under certain conditions. We then present extensive experimental results on benchmark datasets to compare the performance of the various proposed approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we study a new problem of continuous learning from doubly-streaming data where both data volume and feature space increase over time. We refer to the doubly-streaming data as trapezoidal data streams and the corresponding learning problem as online learning from trapezoidal data streams. The problem is challenging because both data volume and data dimension increase over time, and existing online learning [1] , [2] , online feature selection [3] , and streaming feature selection algorithms [4] , [5] are inapplicable. We propose a new Online Learning with Streaming Features algorithm (OLSF for short) and its two variants, which combine online learning [1] , [2] and streaming feature selection [4] , [5] to enable learning from trapezoidal data streams with infinite training instances and features. When a new training instance carrying new features arrives, a classifier updates the existing features by following the passive-aggressive update rule [2] and updates the new features by following the structural risk minimization principle. Feature sparsity is then introduced by using the projected truncation technique. We derive performance bounds of the OLSF algorithm and its variants. We also conduct experiments on real-world data sets to show the performance of the proposed algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With the rapid development of Web 2.0 and Online To Offline (O2O) marketing model, various online event-based social networks (EBSNs) are getting popular. An important task of EBSNs is to facilitate the most satisfactory event-participant arrangement for both sides, i.e., events enroll more participants and participants are arranged with personally interesting events. Existing approaches usually focus on the arrangement of each single event to a set of potential users, or ignore the conflicts between different events, which leads to infeasible or redundant arrangements. In this paper, to address the shortcomings of existing approaches, we first identify a more general and useful event-participant arrangement problem, called Global E vent-participant Arrangement with Conflict and C apacity ($GEACC$ ) problem, focusing on the conflicts of different events and making event-participant arrangements in a global view. We find that the GEACC problem is NP-hard due to the conflicts among events. Thus, we design two approximation algorithms with provable approximation ratios and an exact algorithm with pruning technique to address this problem. In addition, we propose an online setting of GEACC, called OnlineGEACC, which is also practical in real-world scenarios. We further design an online algorithm with provable performance guarantee. Finally, we verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed methods through extensive experiments on real and synthetic datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A representative skyline contains k skyline points that can represent its corresponding full skyline. The existing measuring criteria of k representative skylines are specifically designed for static data, and they cannot effectively handle streaming data. In this paper, we focus on the problem of calculating the k representative skyline over data streams. First, we propose a new criterion to choose k skyline points as the k representative skyline for data stream environments, termed the k largest dominance skyline (k-LDS), which is representative to the entire data set and is highly stable over the streaming data. Second, we propose an efficient exact algorithm, called Prefix-based Algorithm (PBA), to solve the k-LDS problem in a 2-dimensional space. The time complexity of PBA is only O((M −k ) × k) where M is the size of the full skyline set. Third, the k-LDS problem for a d -dimensional (d ≥ 3) space turns out to be very complex. Therefore, a greedy algorithm is designed to answer k-LDS queries. To further accelerate the calculation, we propose a ϵ-greedy algorithm which can achieve an approximate factor of ...(...). Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world data show that our k-LDS significantly outperforms its competitors in data stream environments. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the proposed ϵ-greedy algorithm can solve k-LDS efficiently and with a competitive accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work presents a feature selection method based on proximity relations learning. Each single feature is treated as a binary classifier that predicts for any three objects X, A, and B whether X is close to A or B. The performance of the classifier is a direct measure of feature quality. Any linear combination of feature-based binary classifiers naturally corresponds to feature selection. Thus, the feature selection problem is transformed into an ensemble learning problem of combining many weak classifiers into an optimized strong classifier. We provide a theoretical analysis of the generalization error of our proposed method which validates the effectiveness of our proposed method. Various experiments are conducted on synthetic data, four UCI data sets and 12 microarray data sets, and demonstrate the success of our approach applying to feature selection. A weakness of our algorithm is high time complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Query processing over uncertain data has gained growing attention, because it is necessary to deal with uncertain data in many real-life applications. In this paper, we investigate skyline queries over uncertain data in distributed environments (DSUD query) whose research is only in an early stage. The state-of-the-art algorithm, called e-DSUD algorithm, is designed for processing this query. It has the desirable characteristics of progressiveness and minimum bandwidth consumption. However, it still needs to be perfected in three aspects. (1) Progressiveness. Each time it only returns one query result at most. (2) Efficiency. There are a significant amount of redundant I/O cost and numerous iterations which causes a long total query time. (3) Universality. It is restricted to the case where local skyline tuples are incomparability. To address these concerns, we first present a detailed analysis of the e-DSUD algorithm and then develop an improved framework for the DSUD query, namely IDSUD. Based on the new framework, we propose an adaptive algorithm, called ADSUD, for the DSUD query. In the algorithm, we redefine the approximate global skyline probability and choose local representative tuples due to minimum probabilistic bounding rectangle adaptively. Furthermore, we design a progressive pruning method and apply the reuse mechanism to improve its efficiency. The results of extensive experiments verify the better overall performance of our algorithm than the e-DSUD algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies show that a person is willing to join a social group activity if the activity is interesting, and if some close friends also join the activity as companions. The literature has demonstrated that the interests of a person and the social tightness among friends can be effectively derived and mined from social networking websites. However, even with the above two kinds of information widely available, social group activities still need to be coordinated manually, and the process is tedious and time-consuming for users, especially for a large social group activity, due to complications of social connectivity and the diversity of possible interests among friends. To address the above important need, this paper proposes to automatically select and recommend potential attendees of a social group activity, which could be very useful for social networking websites as a value-added service. We first formulate a new problem, named Willingness mAximization for Social grOup (WASO). This paper points out that the solution obtained by a greedy algorithm is likely to be trapped in a local optimal solution. Thus, we design a new randomized algorithm to effectively and efficiently solve the problem. Given the available computational budgets, the proposed algorithm is able to optimally allocate the resources and find a solution with an approximation ratio. We implement the proposed algorithm in Facebook, and the user study demonstrates that social groups obtained by the proposed algorithm significantly outperform the solutions manually configured by users. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Visually analyzing citation networks poses challenges to many fields of the data mining research. How can we summarize a large citation graph according to the user’s interest? In particular, how can we illustrate the impact of a highly influential paper through the summarization? Can we maintain the sensory node-link graph structure while revealing the flow-based influence patterns and preserving a fine readability? The state-of-the-art influence maximization algorithms can detect the most influential node in a citation network, but fail to summarize a graph structure to account for its influence. On the other hand, existing graph summarization methods fold large graphs into clustered views, but can not reveal the hidden influence patterns underneath the citation network. In this paper, we first formally define the Influence Graph Summarization problem on citation networks. Second, we propose a matrix decomposition based algorithm pipeline to solve the IGS problem. Our method can not only highlight the flow-based influence patterns, but also easily extend to support the rich attribute information. A prototype system called VEGAS implementing this pipeline is also developed. Third, we present a theoretical analysis on our main algorithm, which is equivalent to the kernel k-mean clustering. It can be proved that the matrix decomposition based algorithm can approximate the objective of the proposed IGS problem. Last, we conduct comprehensive experiments with real-world citation networks to compare the proposed algorithm with classical graph summarization methods. Evaluation results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the previous ones in optimizing both the quantitative IGS objective and the quality of the visual summarizations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Co-clustering has emerged to be a powerful data mining tool for two-dimensional co-occurrence and dyadic data. However, co-clustering algorithms often require significant computational resources and have been dismissed as impractical for large data sets. Existing studies have provided strong empirical evidence that expectation-maximization (EM) algorithms (e.g., k-means algorithm) with sequential updates can significantly reduce the computational cost without degrading the resulting solution. Motivated by this observation, we introduce sequential updates for alternate minimization co-clustering (AMCC) algorithms which are variants of EM algorithms, and also show that AMCC algorithms with sequential updates converge. We then propose two approaches to parallelize AMCC algorithms with sequential updates in a distributed environment. Both approaches are proved to maintain the convergence properties of AMCC algorithms. Based on these two approaches, we present a new distributed framework, Co-ClusterD, which supports efficient implementations of AMCC algorithms with sequential updates. We design and implement Co-ClusterD, and show its efficiency through two AMCC algorithms: fast nonnegative matrix tri-factorization (FNMTF) and information theoretic co-clustering (ITCC). We evaluate our framework on both a local cluster of machines and the Amazon EC2 cloud. Empirical results show that AMCC algorithms implemented in Co-ClusterD can achieve a much faster convergence and often obtain better results than their traditional concurrent counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The need to store vast amounts of trajectory data becomes more problematic as GPS-based tracking devices become increasingly prevalent. There are two commonly used approaches for compressing trajectory data. The first is the line generalisation approach which aims to fit the trajectory using a series of line segments. The second is to store the initial data point and then store the remaining data points as a sequence of successive deltas. The line generalisation approach is only effective when given a large error margin, and existing delta compression algorithms do not permit lossy compression. Consequently there is an uncovered gap in which users expect a good compression ratio by giving away only a small error margin. This paper fills this gap by extending the delta compression approach to allow users to trade a small maximum error margin for large improvements to the compression ratio. In addition, alternative techniques are extensively studied for the following two key components of any delta-based approach: predicting the value of the next data point and encoding leading zeros. We propose a new trajectory compression system called Trajic based on the results of the study. Experimental results show that Trajic produces 1.5 times smaller compressed data than a straight-forward delta compression algorithm for lossless compression and produces 9.4 times smaller compressed data than a state-of-the-art line generalisation algorithm when using a small maximum error bound of 1 meter. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Given the proliferation of review content, and the fact that reviews are highly diverse and often unnecessarily verbose, users frequently face the problem of selecting the appropriate reviews to consume. Micro-reviews are emerging as a new type of online review content in the social media. Micro-reviews are posted by users of check-in services such as Foursquare. They are concise (up to 200 characters long) and highly focused, in contrast to the comprehensive and verbose reviews. In this paper, we propose a novel mining problem, which brings together these two disparate sources of review content. Specifically, we use coverage of micro-reviews as an objective for selecting a set of reviews that cover efficiently the salient aspects of an entity. Our approach consists of a two-step process: matching review sentences to micro-reviews, and selecting a small set of reviews that cover as many micro-reviews as possible, with few sentences. We formulate this objective as a combinatorial optimization problem, and show how to derive an optimal solution using Integer Linear Programming. We also propose an efficient heuristic algorithm that approximates the optimal solution. Finally, we perform a detailed evaluation of all the steps of our methodology using data collected from Foursquare and Yelp. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The multiple longest common subsequence (MLCS) problem, related to the identification of sequence similarity, is an important problem in many fields. As an NP-hard problem, its exact algorithms have difficulty in handling large-scale data and time- and space-efficient algorithms are required in real-world applications. To deal with time constraints, anytime algorithms have been proposed to generate good solutions with a reasonable time. However, there exists little work on space-efficient MLCS algorithms. In this paper, we formulate the MLCS problem into a graph search problem and present two space-efficient anytime MLCS algorithms, SA-MLCS and SLA-MLCS. SA-MLCS uses an iterative beam widening search strategy to reduce space usage during the iterative process of finding better solutions. Based on SA-MLCS, SLA-MLCS, a space-bounded algorithm, is developed to avoid space usage from exceeding available memory. SLA-MLCS uses a replacing strategy when SA-MLCS reaches a given space bound. Experimental results show SA-MLCS and SLA-MLCS use an order of magnitude less space and time than the state-of-the-art approximate algorithm MLCS-APP while finding better solutions. Compared to the state-of-the-art anytime algorithm Pro-MLCS, SA-MLCS and SLA-MLCS can solve an order of magnitude larger size instances. Furthermore, SLA-MLCS can find much better solutions than SA-MLCS on large size instances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurately recognizing the object’s behavior from the uncertain sensor data is a key issue of Internet of Things application. For example, in urban management monitoring system, it is necessary to have an autonomous analyzing module that can online monitor object’s behavior based on environmental monitoring information in order to prevent an emergent situation in advance. In this work, we present an approximate object’s behavior analysis method, called AOBA, which can recognize behavioral patterns of the hybrid objects which include patrolman, watering cart, street lamp etc. In intelligent urban management. AOBA consists of two phases: filtering phase and recognizing phase. In the filtering phase, a -approximate pre-matching algorithm based on \(q\) -grams distance is introduced to select possible pattern rapidly, which can discard huge amount insignificant or dirty data; in the recognizing phase, aiming to the temporal and the spatial characteristics of sensor data, an improved bit-parallel string matching algorithm is proposed to recognize the \(k\) -approximate multiple patterns over event sequences selected by the filtering phase. Experiments on real urban monitoring data and synthetic data show that the proposed method can efficiently discriminate object’s behavior. Compared with the existing method, the proposed method provides a fault-tolerant approximate pattern recognition solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on an important query in scientific simulation data analysis: the Spatial Distance Histogram (SDH). The computation time of an SDH query using brute force method is quadratic. Often, such queries are executed continuously over certain time periods, increasing the computation time. We propose highly efficient approximate algorithm to compute SDH over consecutive time periods with provable error bounds. The key idea of our algorithm is to derive statistical distribution of distances from the spatial and temporal characteristics of particles. Upon organizing the data into a Quad-tree based structure, the spatiotemporal characteristics of particles in each node of the tree are acquired to determine the particles’ spatial distribution as well as their temporal locality in consecutive time periods. We report our efforts in implementing and optimizing the above algorithm in graphics processing units (GPUs) as means to further improve the efficiency. The accuracy and efficiency of the proposed algorithm is backed by mathematical analysis and results of extensive experiments using data generated from real simulation studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Majority of the existing works on network analysis study properties that are related to the global topology of a network. Examples of such properties include diameter, power-law exponent, and spectra of graph Laplacian. Such works enhance our understanding of real-life networks, or enable us to generate synthetic graphs with real-life graph properties. However, many of the existing problems on networks require the study of local topological structures of a network, which did not get the deserved attention in the existing works. In this work, we use graphlet frequency distribution (GFD) as an analysis tool for understanding the variance of local topological structure in a network; we also show that it can help in comparing, and characterizing real-life networks. The main bottleneck to obtain GFD is the excessive computation cost for obtaining the frequency of each of the graphlets in a large network. To overcome this, we propose a simple, yet powerful algorithm, called Graft , that obtains the approximate graphlet frequency for all graphlets that have up-to five vertices. Comparing to an exact counting algorithm, our algorithm achieves a speedup factor between 10 and 100 for a negligible counting error, which is, on average, less than 5 percent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measuring similarity between objects is a fundamental task in domains such as data mining, information retrieval, and so on. Link-based similarity measures have attracted the attention of many researchers and have been widely applied in recent years. However, most previous works mainly focus on introducing new link-based measures, and seldom provide theoretical as well as experimental comparisons with other measures. Thus, selecting the suitable measure in different situations and applications is difficult. In this paper, a comprehensive analysis and critical comparison of various link-based similarity measures and algorithms are presented. Their strengths and weaknesses are discussed. Their actual runtime performances are also compared via experiments on benchmark data sets. Some novel and useful guidelines for users to choose the appropriate link-based measure for their applications are discovered. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Enhancing diversity in ranking on graphs has been identified as an important retrieval and mining task. Nevertheless, many existing diversified ranking algorithms either cannot be scalable to large graphs due to the time or memory requirements, or lack an intuitive and reasonable diversified ranking measure. In this paper, we propose a new diversified ranking measure on large graphs, which captures both relevance and diversity, and formulate the diversified ranking problem as a submodular set function maximization problem. Based on the submodularity of the proposed measure, we develop an efficient greedy algorithm with linear time and space complexity w.r.t. the size of the graph to achieve near-optimal diversified ranking. In addition, we present a generalized diversified ranking measure and give a near-optimal randomized greedy algorithm with linear time and space complexity for optimizing it. We evaluate the proposed methods through extensive experiments on five real data sets. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Particle simulation has become an important research tool in many scientific and engineering fields. Data generated by such simulations impose great challenges to database storage and query processing. One of the queries against particle simulation data, the spatial distance histogram (SDH) query, is the building block of many high-level analytics, and requires quadratic time to compute using a straightforward algorithm. Previous work has developed efficient algorithms that compute exact SDHs. While beating the naive solution, such algorithms are still not practical in processing SDH queries against large-scale simulation data. In this paper, we take a different path to tackle this problem by focusing on approximate algorithms with provable error bounds. We first present a solution derived from the aforementioned exact SDH algorithm, and this solution has running time that is unrelated to the system size $(N)$. We also develop a mathematical model to analyze the mechanism that leads to errors in the basic approximate algorithm. Our model provides insights on how the algorithm can be improved to achieve higher accuracy and efficiency. Such insights give rise to a new approximate algorithm with improved time/accuracy tradeoff. Experimental results confirm our analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Similarity joins play an important role in many application areas, such as data integration and cleaning, record linkage, and pattern recognition. In this paper, we study efficient algorithms for similarity joins with an edit distance constraint. Currently, the most prevalent approach is based on extracting overlapping grams from strings and considering only strings that share a certain number of grams as candidates. Unlike these existing approaches, we propose a novel approach to edit similarity join based on extracting nonoverlapping substrings, or chunks, from strings. We propose a class of chunking schemes based on the notion of tail-restricted chunk boundary dictionary. A new algorithm, VChunkJoin, is designed by integrating existing filtering methods and several new filters unique to our chunk-based method. We also design a greedy algorithm to automatically select a good chunking scheme for a given data set. We demonstrate experimentally that the new algorithm is faster than alternative methods yet occupies less space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reducing the computational complexity of inference in Bayesian Networks (BNs) is a key challenge. Current algorithms for inference convert a BN to a junction tree structure made up of clusters of the BN nodes and the resulting complexity is time exponential in the size of a cluster. The need to reduce the complexity is especially acute where the BN contains continuous nodes. We propose a new method for optimizing the calculation of Conditional Probability Tables (CPTs) involving continuous nodes, approximated in Hybrid Bayesian Networks (HBNs), using an approximation algorithm called dynamic discretization. We present an optimized solution to this problem involving binary factorization of the arithmetical expressions declared to generate the CPTs for continuous nodes for deterministic functions and statistical distributions. The proposed algorithm is implemented and tested in a commercial Hybrid Bayesian Network software package and the results of the empirical evaluation show significant performance improvement over unfactorized models. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Top-k dominating queries use an intuitive scoring function which ranks multidimensional points with respect to their dominance power, i.e., the number of points that a point dominates. The k points with the best (e.g., highest) scores are returned to the user. Both top-k and skyline queries have been studied in a streaming environment, where changes to the data set are very frequent. In such an environment, continuous query processing techniques are required toward efficient monitoring of query results, since periodic query re-execution is computationally intensive, and therefore, prohibitive. This work contains the first study of continuous top-k dominating queries over data streams. In comparison to continuous top-k and skyline queries, continuous top-k dominating queries pose additional challenges. Three exact algorithms (BFA, EVA, ADA) are studied, and among them ADA, which is enhanced with additional optimization techniques, shows the best overall performance. In some cases, we are willing to trade accuracy for speed. Toward this direction, two approximate algorithms are proposed (AHBA and AMSA). AHBA offers probabilistic guarantees regarding the accuracy of the result based on the Hoeffding bound, whereas AMSA performs a more aggressive computation resulting in more efficient processing. Evaluation results, based on real-life and synthetic data sets, show the efficiency and scalability of our techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Data and knowledge management systems employ feature selection algorithms for removing irrelevant, redundant, and noisy information from the data. There are two well-known approaches to feature selection, feature ranking (FR) and feature subset selection (FSS). In this paper, we propose a new FR algorithm, termed as class-dependent density-based feature elimination (CDFE), for binary data sets. Our theoretical analysis shows that CDFE computes the weights, used for feature ranking, more efficiently as compared to the mutual information measure. Effectively, rankings obtained from both the two criteria approximate each other. CDFE uses a filtrapper approach to select a final subset. For data sets having hundreds of thousands of features, feature selection with FR algorithms is simple and computationally efficient but redundant information may not be removed. On the other hand, FSS algorithms analyze the data for redundancies but may become computationally impractical on high-dimensional data sets. We address these problems by combining FR and FSS methods in the form of a two-stage feature selection algorithm. When introduced as a preprocessing step to the FSS algorithms, CDFE not only presents them with a feature subset, good in terms of classification, but also relieves them from heavy computations. Two FSS algorithms are employed in the second stage to test the two-stage feature selection idea. We carry out experiments with two different classifiers (naive Bayes' and kernel ridge regression) on three different real-life data sets (NOVA, HIVA, and GINA) of the ”Agnostic Learning versus Prior Knowledge” challenge. As a stand-alone method, CDFE shows up to about 92 percent reduction in the feature set size. When combined with the FSS algorithms in two-stages, CDFE significantly improves their classification accuracy and exhibits up to 97 percent reduction in the feature set size. We also compared CDFE against the winning entries of the challenge and found that it outperforms the best results on NOVA and HIVA while obtaining a third position in case of GINA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given a set of points P and a query set Q, a group enclosing query (Geq) fetches the point p* â P such that the maximum distance of p* to all points in Q is minimized. This problem is equivalent to the Min-Max case (minimizing the maximum distance) of aggregate nearest neighbor queries for spatial databases [27]. This work first designs a new exact solution by exploring new geometric insights, such as the minimum enclosing ball, the convex hull, and the furthest voronoi diagram of the query group. To further reduce the query cost, especially when the dimensionality increases, we turn to approximation algorithms. Our main approximation algorithm has a worst case \sqrt2-approximation ratio if one can find the exact nearest neighbor of a point. In practice, its approximation ratio never exceeds 1.05 for a large number of data sets up to six dimensions. We also discuss how to extend it to higher dimensions (up to 74 in our experiment) and show that it still maintains a very good approximation quality (still close to 1) and low query cost. In fixed dimensions, we extend the \sqrt2-approximation algorithm to get a (1 + ε)-approximate solution for the Geq problem. Both approximation algorithms have O(\log N + M) query cost in any fixed dimension, where N and M are the sizes of the data set P and query group Q. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real data sets, up to 10 million points and 74 dimensions, confirm the efficiency, effectiveness, and scalability of the proposed algorithms, especially their significant improvement over the state-of-the-art method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the problem of summarizing frequent subgraphs by a smaller set of representative patterns. We show that some special graph patterns, called \delta\-jump patterns in this paper, must be representative patterns. Based on the fact, we devise two algorithms, RP-FP and RP-GD, to mine a representative set that summarizes frequent subgraphs. RP-FP derives a representative set from frequent closed subgraphs, whereas RP-GD mines a representative set from graph databases directly. Three novel heuristic strategies, Last-Succeed-First-Check, Reverse-Path-Trace, and Nephew-Representative-Based-Cover, are proposed to further improve the efficiency of RP-GD. RP-FP can provide a tight ratio bound but has heavy computation cost. RP-GD cannot provide a ratio bound guarantee but is more efficient than RP-FP. We also make use of the similarity between sibling branches in the graph pattern space to devise another much more efficient algorithm, RP-Leap, for mining a representative set that can approximately summarize frequent subgraphs. Our extensive experiments on both real and synthetic data sets verify the summarization quality and efficiency of our algorithms. To further demonstrate the interestingness of representative patterns, we study an application of representative patterns to classification. We demonstrate that the classification accuracy achieved by representative pattern-based model is no less than that achieved by closed graph pattern-based model. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]