The Case for Learned Spatial Indexes

Spatial data is ubiquitous. Massive amounts of data are generated every day from billions of GPS-enabled devices such as cell phones, cars, sensors, and various consumer-based applications such as Uber, Tinder, location-tagged posts in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. This exponential growth in spatial data has led the research community to focus on building systems and applications that can process spatial data efficiently. In the meantime, recent research has introduced learned index structures. In this work, we use techniques proposed from a state-of-the art learned multi-dimensional index structure (namely, Flood) and apply them to five classical multi-dimensional indexes to be able to answer spatial range queries. By tuning each partitioning technique for optimal performance, we show that (i) machine learned search within a partition is faster by 11.79\% to 39.51\% than binary search when using filtering on one dimension, (ii) the bottleneck for tree structures is index lookup, which could potentially be improved by linearizing the indexed partitions (iii) filtering on one dimension and refining using machine learned indexes is 1.23x to 1.83x times faster than closest competitor which filters on two dimensions, and (iv) learned indexes can have a significant impact on the performance of low selectivity queries while being less effective under higher selectivities

Efficient Analytical Queries on Semantic Web Data Cubes

The amount of multidimensional data published on the semantic web (SW) is constantly increasing, due to initiatives such as Open Data and Open Government Data, among other ones. Models, languages, and tools, that allow to obtain valuable information efficiently, are thus required. Multidimensional data are typically represented as data cubes, and exploited using Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) techniques. The RDF Data Cube Vocabulary, also denoted QB, is the current W3C standard to represent statistical data on the SW.Since QB does not include key features needed for OLAP analysis, in previous work we have proposed an extension, denoted QB4OLAP, to overcome this problem without the need of modifying already published data. Once data cubes are represented on the SW, we need tools to analyze them. However, writing efficient analytical queries over SW cubes demands a deep knowledge of RDF and SPARQL. These skills are not common in typical analytical users. Also, OLAP languages like MDX are far from being easily understood by the final user. The lack of friendly tools to exploit multidimensional data on the SW is a barrier that needs to be broken to promote the publication of such data. We address this problem in this paper. Our approach is based on allowing analytical users to write queries using OLAP operations over cubes, without dealing with SW standards. For this, we devised CQL (standing for Cube Query Language), a simple, high-level query language that operates over cubes. Using the metadata provided by QB4OLAP, we translate CQL queries into SPARQL. Then, we propose query improvement strategies to produce efficient SPARQL queries, adapting SPARQL query optimization techniques. We evaluate our approach using the Star-Schema benchmark, showing that our proposal outperforms others. A web application that allows querying SW data cubes using CQL, completes our contributions

Efficient Graph Computation for Node2Vec

Node2Vec is a state-of-the-art general-purpose feature learning method for network analysis. However, current solutions cannot run Node2Vec on large-scale graphs with billions of vertices and edges, which are common in real-world applications. The existing distributed Node2Vec on Spark incurs significant space and time overhead. It runs out of memory even for mid-sized graphs with millions of vertices. Moreover, it considers at most 30 edges for every vertex in generating random walks, causing poor result quality. In this paper, we propose Fast-Node2Vec, a family of efficient Node2Vec random walk algorithms on a Pregel-like graph computation framework. Fast-Node2Vec computes transition probabilities during random walks to reduce memory space consumption and computation overhead for large-scale graphs. The Pregel-like scheme avoids space and time overhead of Spark's read-only RDD structures and shuffle operations. Moreover, we propose a number of optimization techniques to further reduce the computation overhead for popular vertices with large degrees. Empirical evaluation show that Fast-Node2Vec is capable of computing Node2Vec on graphs with billions of vertices and edges on a mid-sized machine cluster. Compared to Spark-Node2Vec, Fast-Node2Vec achieves 7.7--122x speedups