Automated Testing and Debugging for Big Data Analytics

The prevalence of big data analytics in almost every large-scale software system has generated a substantial push to build data-intensive scalable computing (DISC) frameworks such as Google MapReduce and Apache Spark that can fully harness the power of existing data centers. However, frameworks once used by domain experts are now being leveraged by data scientists, business analysts, and researchers. This shift in user demographics calls for immediate advancements in the development, debugging, and testing practices of big data applications, which are falling behind compared to the DISC framework design and implementation. In practice, big data applications often fail as users are unable to test all behaviors emerging from interleaving dataflow operators, user-defined functions, and framework's code. "Testing based on a random sample" rarely guarantees the reliability and "trial and error" and "print" debugging methods are expensive and time-consuming. Thus, the current practice of developing a big data application must be improved and the tools built to enhance the developer's productivity must adapt to the distinct characteristics of data-intensive scalable computing. By synthesizing ideas from software engineering and database systems, our hypothesis is that we can design effective and scalable testing and debugging algorithms for big data analytics without compromising the performance and efficiency of the underlying DISC framework. To design such techniques, we investigate how we can build interactive and responsive debugging primitives that significantly reduce the debugging time, yet do not pose much performance overhead on big data applications. Furthermore, we investigate how we can leverage data provenance techniques from databases and fault-isolation algorithms from software engineering to pinpoint the minimal subset of failure-inducing inputs efficiently. To improve the reliability of big data analytics, we investigate how we can abstract the semantics of dataflow operators and use them in tandem with the semantics of user-defined functions to generate a minimum set of synthetic test inputs capable of revealing more defects than the entire input dataset.To examine the first hypothesis, we introduce interactive, real-time debugging primitives for big data analytics through innovative and scalable debugging features such as simulated breakpoint, dynamic watchpoint, and crash culprit identification. Second, we design a new automated fault localization approach that combines insights from both the software engineering and database literature to bring delta debugging closer to a reality in the big data applications by leveraging data provenance and by constructing systems optimizations for debugging provenance queries. Lastly, we devise a new symbolic-execution based white-box testing algorithm for big data applications that abstracts the implementation of dataflow operators using logical specifications instead of modeling their implementations and combines them with the semantics of any arbitrary user-defined function. We instantiate the idea of an interactive debugging algorithm as BigDebug, the idea of an automated debugging algorithm as BigSift, and the idea of symbolic execution-based testing as BigTest. Our investigation shows that the interactive debugging primitives can scale to terabytes---our record-level tracing incurs less than 25% overhead on average and provides up to 100% time saving compared to the baseline replay debugger. Second, we observe that by combining data provenance with delta debugging, we can identify the minimum faulty input in just under 30% of the original job execution time. Lastly, we verify that by abstracting dataflow operators using logical specifications, we can efficiently generate the most concise test data suitable for local testing while revealing twice as many faults as prior approaches. Our investigations collectively demonstrate that developer productivity can be significantly improved through effective and scalable testing and debugging techniques for big data analytics, without impacting the DISC framework's performance. This dissertation affirms the feasibility of automated debugging and testing techniques for big data analytics---techniques that were previously considered infeasible for large-scale data processing

MRPR: a MapReduce solution for prototype reduction in big data classification

In the era of big data, analyzing and extracting knowledge from large-scale data sets is a very interesting and challenging task. The application of standard data mining tools in such data sets is not straightforward. Hence, a new class of scalable mining method that embraces the huge storage and processing capacity of cloud platforms is required. In this work, we propose a novel distributed partitioning methodology for prototype reduction techniques in nearest neighbor classification. These methods aim at representing original training data sets as a reduced number of instances. Their main purposes are to speed up the classification process and reduce the storage requirements and sensitivity to noise of the nearest neighbor rule. However, the standard prototype reduction methods cannot cope with very large data sets. To overcome this limitation, we develop a MapReduce-based framework to distribute the functioning of these algorithms through a cluster of computing elements, proposing several algorithmic strategies to integrate multiple partial solutions (reduced sets of prototypes) into a single one. The proposed model enables prototype reduction algorithms to be applied over big data classification problems without significant accuracy loss. We test the speeding up capabilities of our model with data sets up to 5.7 millions of instances. The results show that this model is a suitable tool to enhance the performance of the nearest neighbor classifier with big data

Understanding and Comparing Scalable Gaussian Process Regression for Big Data

As a non-parametric Bayesian model which produces informative predictive distribution, Gaussian process (GP) has been widely used in various fields, like regression, classification and optimization. The cubic complexity of standard GP however leads to poor scalability, which poses challenges in the era of big data. Hence, various scalable GPs have been developed in the literature in order to improve the scalability while retaining desirable prediction accuracy. This paper devotes to investigating the methodological characteristics and performance of representative global and local scalable GPs including sparse approximations and local aggregations from four main perspectives: scalability, capability, controllability and robustness. The numerical experiments on two toy examples and five real-world datasets with up to 250K points offer the following findings. In terms of scalability, most of the scalable GPs own a time complexity that is linear to the training size. In terms of capability, the sparse approximations capture the long-term spatial correlations, the local aggregations capture the local patterns but suffer from over-fitting in some scenarios. In terms of controllability, we could improve the performance of sparse approximations by simply increasing the inducing size. But this is not the case for local aggregations. In terms of robustness, local aggregations are robust to various initializations of hyperparameters due to the local attention mechanism. Finally, we highlight that the proper hybrid of global and local scalable GPs may be a promising way to improve both the model capability and scalability for big data.Comment: 25 pages, 15 figures, preprint submitted to KB

Analysis of Microarray Data using Machine Learning Techniques on Scalable Platforms

Microarray-based gene expression profiling has been emerged as an efficient technique for classification, diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of cancer disease. Frequent changes in the behavior of this disease, generate a huge volume of data. The data retrieved from microarray cover its veracities, and the changes observed as time changes (velocity). Although, it is a type of high-dimensional data which has very large number of features rather than number of samples. Therefore, the analysis of microarray high-dimensional dataset in a short period is very much essential. It often contains huge number of data, only a fraction of which comprises significantly expressed genes. The identification of the precise and interesting genes which are responsible for the cause of cancer is imperative in microarray data analysis. Most of the existing schemes employ a two phase process such as feature selection/extraction followed by classification. Our investigation starts with the analysis of microarray data using kernel based classifiers followed by feature selection using statistical t-test. In this work, various kernel based classifiers like Extreme learning machine (ELM), Relevance vector machine (RVM), and a new proposed method called kernel fuzzy inference system (KFIS) are implemented. The proposed models are investigated using three microarray datasets like Leukemia, Breast and Ovarian cancer. Finally, the performance of these classifiers are measured and compared with Support vector machine (SVM). From the results, it is revealed that the proposed models are able to classify the datasets efficiently and the performance is comparable to the existing kernel based classifiers. As the data size increases, to handle and process these datasets becomes very bottleneck. Hence, a distributed and a scalable cluster like Hadoop is needed for storing (HDFS) and processing (MapReduce as well as Spark) the datasets in an efficient way. The next contribution in this thesis deals with the implementation of feature selection methods, which are able to process the data in a distributed manner. Various statistical tests like ANOVA, Kruskal-Wallis, and Friedman tests are implemented using MapReduce and Spark frameworks which are executed on the top of Hadoop cluster. The performance of these scalable models are measured and compared with the conventional system. From the results, it is observed that the proposed scalable models are very efficient to process data of larger dimensions (GBs, TBs, etc.), as it is not possible to process with the traditional implementation of those algorithms. After selecting the relevant features, the next contribution of this thesis is the scalable viii implementation of the proximal support vector machine classifier, which is an efficient variant of SVM. The proposed classifier is implemented on the two scalable frameworks like MapReduce and Spark and executed on the Hadoop cluster. The obtained results are compared with the results obtained using conventional system. From the results, it is observed that the scalable cluster is well suited for the Big data. Furthermore, it is concluded that Spark is more efficient than MapReduce due to its an intelligent way of handling the datasets through Resilient distributed dataset (RDD) as well as in-memory processing and conventional system to analyze the Big datasets. Therefore, the next contribution of the thesis is the implementation of various scalable classifiers base on Spark. In this work various classifiers like, Logistic regression (LR), Support vector machine (SVM), Naive Bayes (NB), K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Artificial Neural Network (ANN), and Radial basis function network (RBFN) with two variants hybrid and gradient descent learning algorithms are proposed and implemented using Spark framework. The proposed scalable models are executed on Hadoop cluster as well as conventional system and the results are investigated. From the obtained results, it is observed that the execution of the scalable algorithms are very efficient than conventional system for processing the Big datasets. The efficacy of the proposed scalable algorithms to handle Big datasets are investigated and compared with the conventional system (where data are not distributed, kept on standalone machine and processed in a traditional manner). The comparative analysis shows that the scalable algorithms are very efficient to process Big datasets on Hadoop cluster rather than the conventional system

Evolving Large-Scale Data Stream Analytics based on Scalable PANFIS

Many distributed machine learning frameworks have recently been built to speed up the large-scale data learning process. However, most distributed machine learning used in these frameworks still uses an offline algorithm model which cannot cope with the data stream problems. In fact, large-scale data are mostly generated by the non-stationary data stream where its pattern evolves over time. To address this problem, we propose a novel Evolving Large-scale Data Stream Analytics framework based on a Scalable Parsimonious Network based on Fuzzy Inference System (Scalable PANFIS), where the PANFIS evolving algorithm is distributed over the worker nodes in the cloud to learn large-scale data stream. Scalable PANFIS framework incorporates the active learning (AL) strategy and two model fusion methods. The AL accelerates the distributed learning process to generate an initial evolving large-scale data stream model (initial model), whereas the two model fusion methods aggregate an initial model to generate the final model. The final model represents the update of current large-scale data knowledge which can be used to infer future data. Extensive experiments on this framework are validated by measuring the accuracy and running time of four combinations of Scalable PANFIS and other Spark-based built in algorithms. The results indicate that Scalable PANFIS with AL improves the training time to be almost two times faster than Scalable PANFIS without AL. The results also show both rule merging and the voting mechanisms yield similar accuracy in general among Scalable PANFIS algorithms and they are generally better than Spark-based algorithms. In terms of running time, the Scalable PANFIS training time outperforms all Spark-based algorithms when classifying numerous benchmark datasets.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figure