Flexible constrained sampling with guarantees for pattern mining

Pattern sampling has been proposed as a potential solution to the infamous pattern explosion. Instead of enumerating all patterns that satisfy the constraints, individual patterns are sampled proportional to a given quality measure. Several sampling algorithms have been proposed, but each of them has its limitations when it comes to 1) flexibility in terms of quality measures and constraints that can be used, and/or 2) guarantees with respect to sampling accuracy. We therefore present Flexics, the first flexible pattern sampler that supports a broad class of quality measures and constraints, while providing strong guarantees regarding sampling accuracy. To achieve this, we leverage the perspective on pattern mining as a constraint satisfaction problem and build upon the latest advances in sampling solutions in SAT as well as existing pattern mining algorithms. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm is applicable to a variety of pattern languages, which allows us to introduce and tackle the novel task of sampling sets of patterns. We introduce and empirically evaluate two variants of Flexics: 1) a generic variant that addresses the well-known itemset sampling task and the novel pattern set sampling task as well as a wide range of expressive constraints within these tasks, and 2) a specialized variant that exploits existing frequent itemset techniques to achieve substantial speed-ups. Experiments show that Flexics is both accurate and efficient, making it a useful tool for pattern-based data exploration.Comment: Accepted for publication in Data Mining & Knowledge Discovery journal (ECML/PKDD 2017 journal track

A Framework for High-Accuracy Privacy-Preserving Mining

To preserve client privacy in the data mining process, a variety of techniques based on random perturbation of data records have been proposed recently. In this paper, we present a generalized matrix-theoretic model of random perturbation, which facilitates a systematic approach to the design of perturbation mechanisms for privacy-preserving mining. Specifically, we demonstrate that (a) the prior techniques differ only in their settings for the model parameters, and (b) through appropriate choice of parameter settings, we can derive new perturbation techniques that provide highly accurate mining results even under strict privacy guarantees. We also propose a novel perturbation mechanism wherein the model parameters are themselves characterized as random variables, and demonstrate that this feature provides significant improvements in privacy at a very marginal cost in accuracy. While our model is valid for random-perturbation-based privacy-preserving mining in general, we specifically evaluate its utility here with regard to frequent-itemset mining on a variety of real datasets. The experimental results indicate that our mechanisms incur substantially lower identity and support errors as compared to the prior techniques

Maximizing Welfare in Social Networks under a Utility Driven Influence Diffusion Model

Motivated by applications such as viral marketing, the problem of influence maximization (IM) has been extensively studied in the literature. The goal is to select a small number of users to adopt an item such that it results in a large cascade of adoptions by others. Existing works have three key limitations. (1) They do not account for economic considerations of a user in buying/adopting items. (2) Most studies on multiple items focus on competition, with complementary items receiving limited attention. (3) For the network owner, maximizing social welfare is important to ensure customer loyalty, which is not addressed in prior work in the IM literature. In this paper, we address all three limitations and propose a novel model called UIC that combines utility-driven item adoption with influence propagation over networks. Focusing on the mutually complementary setting, we formulate the problem of social welfare maximization in this novel setting. We show that while the objective function is neither submodular nor supermodular, surprisingly a simple greedy allocation algorithm achieves a factor of $(1-1/e-\epsilon)$ of the optimum expected social welfare. We develop \textsf{bundleGRD}, a scalable version of this approximation algorithm, and demonstrate, with comprehensive experiments on real and synthetic datasets, that it significantly outperforms all baselines.Comment: 33 page

An evolutionary model to mine high expected utility patterns from uncertain databases

In recent decades, mobile or the Internet of Thing (IoT) devices are dramatically increasing in many domains and applications. Thus, a massive amount of data is generated and produced. Those collected data contain a large amount of interesting information (i.e., interestingness, weight, frequency, or uncertainty), and most of the existing and generic algorithms in pattern mining only consider the single object and precise data to discover the required information. Meanwhile, since the collected information is huge, and it is necessary to discover meaningful and up-to-date information in a limit and particular time. In this paper, we consider both utility and uncertainty as the majority objects to efficiently mine the interesting high expected utility patterns (HEUPs) in a limit time based on the multi-objective evolutionary framework. The benefits of the designed model (called MOEA-HEUPM) can discover the valuable HEUPs without pre-defined threshold values (i.e., minimum utility and minimum uncertainty) in the uncertain environment. Two encoding methodologies are also considered in the developed MOEA-HEUPM to show its effectiveness. Based on the developed MOEA-HEUPM model, the set of non-dominated HEUPs can be discovered in a limit time for decision-making. Experiments are then conducted to show the effectiveness and efficiency of the designed MOEA-HEUPM model in terms of convergence, hypervolume and number of the discovered patterns compared to the generic approaches.acceptedVersio

Structural advances for pattern discovery in multi-relational databases

With ever-growing storage needs and drift towards very large relational storage settings, multi-relational data mining has become a prominent and pertinent field for discovering unique and interesting relational patterns. As a consequence, a whole suite of multi-relational data mining techniques is being developed. These techniques may either be extensions to the already existing single-table mining techniques or may be developed from scratch. For the traditionalists, single-table mining algorithms can be used to work on multi-relational settings by making inelegant and time consuming joins of all target relations. However, complex relational patterns cannot be expressed in a single-table format and thus, cannot be discovered. This work presents a new multi-relational frequent pattern mining algorithm termed Multi-Relational Frequent Pattern Growth (MRFP Growth). MRFP Growth is capable of mining multiple relations, linked with referential integrity, for frequent patterns that satisfy a user specified support threshold. Empirical results on MRFP Growth performance and its comparison with the state-of-the-art multirelational data mining algorithms like WARMR and Decentralized Apriori are discussed at length. MRFP Growth scores over the latter two techniques in number of patterns generated and speed. The realm of multi-relational clustering is also explored in this thesis. A multi-Relational Item Clustering approach based on Hypergraphs (RICH) is proposed. Experimentally RICH combined with MRFP Growth proves to be a competitive approach for clustering multi-relational data. The performance and iii quality of clusters generated by RICH are compared with other clustering algorithms. Finally, the thesis demonstrates the applied utility of the theoretical implications of the above mentioned algorithms in an application framework for auto-annotation of images in an image database. The system is called CoMMA which stands for Combining Multi-relational Multimedia for Associations

Modern Approaches to Uncertain Database Exploration from Categorizing Data to Advanced Mining Solutions

In today's digitized era, the ubiquity of data from diverse sources has introduced unique challenges in database management, notably the issue of data uncertainty. Uncertainty in databases can arise from various factors – sensor inaccuracies, human input errors, or inherent vagueness in data interpretation. Addressing these challenges, this research delves into modern approaches to uncertain database exploration. The paper begins by exploring methods for categorizing data based on certainty levels, emphasizing the importance and mechanisms to distinguish between certain and uncertain data. The discussion then transitions to highlight pioneering mining solutions that enhance the utility of uncertain databases. By integrating state-of-the-art techniques with traditional database management principles, this study aims to bolster the reliability, efficiency, and versatility of data mining in uncertain contexts. The implications of these methods, both theoretically and in real-world applications, hold the potential to redefine how uncertain data is perceived and utilized in diverse sectors, from healthcare to finance

A Novel Nodesets-Based Frequent Itemset Mining Algorithm for Big Data using MapReduce

Due to the rapid growth of data from different sources in organizations, the traditional tools and techniques that cannot handle such huge data are known as big data which is in a scalable fashion. Similarly, many existing frequent itemset mining algorithms have good performance but scalability problems as they cannot exploit parallel processing power available locally or in cloud infrastructure. Since big data and cloud ecosystem overcomes the barriers or limitations in computing resources, it is a natural choice to use distributed programming paradigms such as Map Reduce. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm known as A Nodesets-based Fast and Scalable Frequent Itemset Mining (FSFIM) to extract frequent itemsets from Big Data. Here, Pre-Order Coding (POC) tree is used to represent data and improve speed in processing. Nodeset is the underlying data structure that is efficient in discovering frequent itemsets. FSFIM is found to be faster and more scalable in mining frequent itemsets. When compared with its predecessors such as Node-lists and N-lists, the Nodesets save half of the memory as they need only either pre-order or post-order coding. Cloudera\u27s Distribution of Hadoop (CDH), a MapReduce framework, is used for empirical study. A prototype application is built to evaluate the performance of the FSFIM. Experimental results revealed that FSFIM outperforms existing algorithms such as Mahout PFP, Mlib PFP, and Big FIM. FSFIM is more scalable and found to be an ideal candidate for real-time applications that mine frequent itemsets from Big Data

Deep Item-based Collaborative Filtering for Top-N Recommendation

Item-based Collaborative Filtering(short for ICF) has been widely adopted in recommender systems in industry, owing to its strength in user interest modeling and ease in online personalization. By constructing a user's profile with the items that the user has consumed, ICF recommends items that are similar to the user's profile. With the prevalence of machine learning in recent years, significant processes have been made for ICF by learning item similarity (or representation) from data. Nevertheless, we argue that most existing works have only considered linear and shallow relationship between items, which are insufficient to capture the complicated decision-making process of users. In this work, we propose a more expressive ICF solution by accounting for the nonlinear and higher-order relationship among items. Going beyond modeling only the second-order interaction (e.g. similarity) between two items, we additionally consider the interaction among all interacted item pairs by using nonlinear neural networks. Through this way, we can effectively model the higher-order relationship among items, capturing more complicated effects in user decision-making. For example, it can differentiate which historical itemsets in a user's profile are more important in affecting the user to make a purchase decision on an item. We treat this solution as a deep variant of ICF, thus term it as DeepICF. To justify our proposal, we perform empirical studies on two public datasets from MovieLens and Pinterest. Extensive experiments verify the highly positive effect of higher-order item interaction modeling with nonlinear neural networks. Moreover, we demonstrate that by more fine-grained second-order interaction modeling with attention network, the performance of our DeepICF method can be further improved.Comment: 25 pages, submitted to TOI

Structured Review of the Evidence for Effects of Code Duplication on Software Quality

This report presents the detailed steps and results of a structured review of code clone literature. The aim of the review is to investigate the evidence for the claim that code duplication has a negative effect on code changeability. This report contains only the details of the review for which there is not enough place to include them in the companion paper published at a conference (Hordijk, Ponisio et al. 2009 - Harmfulness of Code Duplication - A Structured Review of the Evidence)