XML documents clustering using a tensor space model

The traditional Vector Space Model (VSM) is not able to represent both the structure and the content of XML documents. This paper introduces a novel method of representing XML documents in a Tensor Space Model (TSM) and then utilizing it for clustering. Empirical analysis shows that the proposed method is scalable for large-sized datasets; as well, the factorized matrices produced from the proposed method help to improve the quality of clusters through the enriched document representation of both structure and content information

Tree mining application to matching of hetereogeneous knowledge

Matching of heterogeneous knowledge sources is of increasing importance in areas such as scientific knowledge management, e-commerce, enterprise application integration, and many emerging Semantic Web applications. With the desire of knowledge sharing and reuse in these fields, it is common that the knowledge coming from different organizations from the same domain is to be matched. We propose a knowledge matching method based on our previously developed tree mining algorithms for extracting frequently occurring subtrees from a tree structured database such as XML. Using the method the common structure among the different representations can be automatically extracted. Our focus is on knowledge matching at the structural level and we use a set of example XML schema documents from the same domain to evaluate the method. We discuss some important issues that arise when applying tree mining algorithms for detection of common document structures. The experiments demonstrate the usefulness of the approach

Mining complex structured data: Enhanced methods and applications

Conventional approaches to analysing complex business data typically rely on process models, which are difficult to construct and use. This thesis addresses this issue by converting semi-structured event logs to a simpler flat representation without any loss of information, which then enables direct applications of classical data mining methods. The thesis also proposes an effective and scalable classification method which can identify distinct characteristics of a business process for further improvements

Mining XML Documents

XML documents are becoming ubiquitous because of their rich and flexible format that can be used for a variety of applications. Giving the increasing size of XML collections as information sources, mining techniques that traditionally exist for text collections or databases need to be adapted and new methods to be invented to exploit the particular structure of XML documents. Basically XML documents can be seen as trees, which are well known to be complex structures. This chapter describes various ways of using and simplifying this tree structure to model documents and support efficient mining algorithms. We focus on three mining tasks: classification and clustering which are standard for text collections; discovering of frequent tree structure which is especially important for heterogeneous collection. This chapter presents some recent approaches and algorithms to support these tasks together with experimental evaluation on a variety of large XML collections

The Importance of Sibling Clustering for Efficient Bulkload of XML Document Trees

In an XML Data Store (XDS), importing documents from external sources is a very frequent operation. Since a document import consists of a large number of individual node inserts, it is essentially a small bulkload operation. Hence, efficient bulkload support is crucial for XDSs. Essentially, XML bulkload is the transformation of an XML parser's output into the XDS's persistent storage structures. This involves two major subtasks: (1) Partitioning the documents' logical tree structure into subtrees smaller than a disk page in a way that is both space-efficient an suitable for later processing. (2) Mapping the subtrees to the XDS's internal page representation. In enterprise-scale environments with very large documents and/or very many parallel bulkloads, task (1) is particularly challenging, as not only disk space consumption, but also CPU and main-memory usage are important factors. In this article, we (1) discuss requirements for an XML bulkload module, (2) examine existing algorithms for tree partitioning with respect to their applicability as XML bulkload algorithms, (3) derive a new tree partitioning algorithm, (4) present the design and implementation of the bulkload module used in our Natix XDS, and (5) evaluate the implementation

Tree model guided (TMG) enumeration as the basis for mining frequent patterns from XML documents

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Information Technology.Association mining consists of two important problems, namely frequent patterns discovery and rule construction. The former task is considered to be a more challenging problem to solve. Because of its importance and application in a number of data mining tasks, it has become the focus of many studies. A substantial amount of research has gone into the development of efficient algorithms for mining patterns from large structured or relational data. Compared with the fruitful achievements in mining structured data, mining in the semi-structured world still remains at a preliminary stage. The most popular representative of the semi-structured data is XML. Mining frequent patterns from XML poses more challenges in comparison to mining frequent patterns from relational data because XML is a tree-structured data and has an ordered data context. Moreover, XML data in general is larger in data size due to richer contents and more meta-data. Dealing with XML, thus involves greater unprecedented complexity in comparison to mining relational data. Mining frequent patterns from XML can be recast as mining frequent tree structures from a database of XML documents. The increase of XML data and the need for mining semi-structured data has sparked a lot of interest in finding frequent rooted trees in forests. In this thesis, we aim to develop a framework to mine frequent patterns from XML documents. The framework utilizes a structure-guided enumeration approach, Tree Model Guided (TMG), for efficient enumeration of tree structure and it makes use of novel structures for fast enumeration and frequency counting. By utilizing a novel array-based structure, an embedded list (EL), the framework offers a simple sequencelike tree enumeration technique. The effectiveness and extendibility of the framework is demonstrated in that it can be utilized not only for enumerating ordered subtrees but also for enumerating unordered subtrees and subsequences. Furthermore, the framework tackles the unprecedented complexity in mining frequent tree-structured patterns by generating only valid candidates with non-zero frequency count and employing a constraint-driven approach. Our experimental studies comparing the proposed framework with the state-of-the-art algorithms demonstrate the effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed framework

Efficient storage of XML data

We introduce NATIX, an efficient, native repository for storing, retrieving and managing tree-structured large objects, preferably XML documents. In contrast to traditionallarge object (LOB) managers, we do not split at arbitrary byte positions but take the semantics of the underlying tree structure of XML documents into account. Our parameterizable split algorithm dynamically maintains physical records of size smaller than a page which contain sets of connected tree nodes. This not only improves efficiency by clustering subtrees but also facilitates their compact representation. Existing approaches to store XML documents either use flat files or map every single tree node onto a separate physical record. The increased flexibility of our approach results in higher efficiency. Performance measurements validate this claim

Anatomy of a Native XML Base Management System

Several alternatives to manage large XML document collections exist, ranging from file systems over relational or other database systems to specifically tailored XML repositories. In this paper we give a tour of Natix, a database management system designed from scratch for storing and processing XML data. Contrary to the common belief that management of XML data is just another application for traditional databases like relational systems, we illustrate how almost every component in a database system is affected in terms of adequacy and performance. We show how to design and optimize areas such as storage, transaction management comprising recovery and multi-user synchronisation as well as query processing for XML

Pattern discovery in structural databases with applications to bioinformatics

Frequent structure mining (FSM) aims to discover and extract patterns frequently occurring in structural data such as trees and graphs. FSM finds many applications in bioinformatics, XML processing, Web log analysis, and so on. In this thesis, two new FSM techniques are proposed for finding patterns in unordered labeled trees. Such trees can be used to model evolutionary histories of different species, among others. The first FSM technique finds cousin pairs in the trees. A cousin pair is a pair of nodes sharing the same parent, the same grandparent, or the same great-grandparent, etc. Given a tree T, our algorithm finds all interesting cousin pairs of T in O(|T|2) time where |T| is the number of nodes in T. Experimental results on synthetic data and phylogenies show the scalability and effectiveness of the proposed technique. This technique has been applied to locating co-occurring patterns in multiple evolutionary trees, evaluating the consensus of equally parsimonious trees, and finding kernel trees of groups of phylogenies. The technique is also extended to undirected acyclic graphs (or free trees). The second FSM technique extends traditional MAST (maximum agreement subtree) algorithms by employing the Apriori data mining technique to find frequent agreement subtrees in multiple phylogenies. The correctness and completeness of the new mining algorithm are presented. The method is also extended to unrooted phylogenetic trees. Both FSM techniques studied in the thesis have been implemented into a toolkit, which is fully operational and accessible on the World Wide Web