4,668 research outputs found
Approximate Computation and Implicit Regularization for Very Large-scale Data Analysis
Database theory and database practice are typically the domain of computer
scientists who adopt what may be termed an algorithmic perspective on their
data. This perspective is very different than the more statistical perspective
adopted by statisticians, scientific computers, machine learners, and other who
work on what may be broadly termed statistical data analysis. In this article,
I will address fundamental aspects of this algorithmic-statistical disconnect,
with an eye to bridging the gap between these two very different approaches. A
concept that lies at the heart of this disconnect is that of statistical
regularization, a notion that has to do with how robust is the output of an
algorithm to the noise properties of the input data. Although it is nearly
completely absent from computer science, which historically has taken the input
data as given and modeled algorithms discretely, regularization in one form or
another is central to nearly every application domain that applies algorithms
to noisy data. By using several case studies, I will illustrate, both
theoretically and empirically, the nonobvious fact that approximate
computation, in and of itself, can implicitly lead to statistical
regularization. This and other recent work suggests that, by exploiting in a
more principled way the statistical properties implicit in worst-case
algorithms, one can in many cases satisfy the bicriteria of having algorithms
that are scalable to very large-scale databases and that also have good
inferential or predictive properties.Comment: To appear in the Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Symposium on Principles
of Database Systems (PODS 2012
Parallel Graph Partitioning for Complex Networks
Processing large complex networks like social networks or web graphs has
recently attracted considerable interest. In order to do this in parallel, we
need to partition them into pieces of about equal size. Unfortunately, previous
parallel graph partitioners originally developed for more regular mesh-like
networks do not work well for these networks. This paper addresses this problem
by parallelizing and adapting the label propagation technique originally
developed for graph clustering. By introducing size constraints, label
propagation becomes applicable for both the coarsening and the refinement phase
of multilevel graph partitioning. We obtain very high quality by applying a
highly parallel evolutionary algorithm to the coarsened graph. The resulting
system is both more scalable and achieves higher quality than state-of-the-art
systems like ParMetis or PT-Scotch. For large complex networks the performance
differences are very big. For example, our algorithm can partition a web graph
with 3.3 billion edges in less than sixteen seconds using 512 cores of a high
performance cluster while producing a high quality partition -- none of the
competing systems can handle this graph on our system.Comment: Review article. Parallelization of our previous approach
arXiv:1402.328
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