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The papers in this special section were presented a the 29th International Conference on Data Engineering was held in Brisbane, QLD, Australia, on April 8-11, 2013. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With recent advances in information technologies such as global position system and mobile internet, a huge volume of spatio-textual objects have been generated from location-based services, which enable a wide range of spatial keyword queries. Recently, researchers have proposed a novel query, called Spatial Pattern Matching (SPM), which uses a pattern to capture the user's intention. It has been demonstrated to be fundamental and useful for many real applications. Despite its usefulness, the SPM problem is computationally intractable. Existing algorithms suffer from the low efficiency issue, especially on large scale datasets. To enhance the performance of SPM, in this paper we propose a novel Efficient Spatial Pattern Matching (ESPM) algorithm, which exploits the inverted linear quadtree index and computes matched node pairs and object pairs level by level in a top-down manner. In particular, it focuses on pruning unpromising nodes and node pairs at the high levels, resulting in a large number of unpromising objects and object pairs to be pruned before accessing them from disk. We experimentally evaluate the performance of ESPM on real large datasets. Our results show that ESPM is over one order of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art algorithm, and also uses much less I/O cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Group recommendation has become highly demanded when users communicate in the forms of group activities in online sharing communities. These group activities include student group study, family TV program watching, friends travel decision, etc. Existing group recommendation techniques mainly focus on the small user groups. However, online sharing communities have enabled group activities among thousands of users. Accordingly, recommendation over large groups has become urgent. In this paper, we propose a new framework to accomplish this goal by exploring the group interests and the connections between group users. We first divide a big group into different interest subgroups, each of which contains users closely connected with each other and sharing the similar interests. Then, for each interest subgroup, our framework exploits the connections between group users to collect a comparably compact potential candidate set of media-user pairs, on which the collaborative filtering is performed to generate an interest subgroup-based recommendation list. After that, a novel aggregation function is proposed to integrate the recommended media lists of all interest subgroups as the final group recommendation results. Extensive experiments have been conducted on two real social media datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Uncertain graph management and analysis have attracted many research attentions. Among them, computing $k$ k -cores in uncertain graphs (aka, $(k,\eta)$ (k , η) -cores) is an important problem and has emerged in many applications such as community detection, protein-protein interaction network analysis and influence maximization. Given an uncertain graph, the $(k,\eta)$ (k , η) -cores can be derived by iteratively removing the vertex with an $\eta$ η -degree of less than $k$ k . However, the results heavily depend on the two input parameters $k$ k and $\eta$ η . The settings for these parameters are unique to the specific graph structure and the user's subjective requirements. In addition, computing and updating the $\eta$ η -degree for each vertex is the most costly component in the algorithm, and the cost is high. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose an index-based solution for computing $(k,\eta)$ (k , η) -cores. The size of the index is well bounded by $O(m)$ O (m) , where $m$ m is the number of edges in the graph. Based on the index, queries for any $k$ k and $\eta$ η can be answered in optimal time. We propose an algorithm for index construction with several different optimizations. We also propose a new algorithm for index construction in external memory. We conduct extensive experiments on eight real-world datasets to practically evaluate the performance of all proposed algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The national health insurance system in Australia records details on medical services and claims provided to its population. An effective method to the discovery of temporal behavioral patterns in the data set is proposed in this paper. The method consists of a two-step approach which is applied recursively to the data set. First, a clustering algorithm is used to segment the data into classes. Then, hidden Markov models are employed to find the underlying temporal behavioral patterns. These steps are applied recursively to features extracted from the data set until convergence. The main objective is to minimize the misclassification of patient profiles into various classes. This results in a hierarchical tree model consisting of a number of classes; each class groups similar patient temporal behavioral patterns together. The capabilities of the proposed method are demonstrated through the application to a subset of the Australian national health insurance data set. It is shown that the proposed method not only clusters data into various categories of interest, but it also automatically marks the periods in which similar temporal behavioral patterns occurred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]