Automated Deployment of a Spark Cluster with Machine Learning Algorithm Integration

The vast amount of data stored nowadays has turned big data analytics into a very trendy research field. The Spark distributed computing platform has emerged as a dominant and widely used paradigm for cluster deployment and big data analytics. However, to get started up is still a task that may take much time when manually done, due to the requisites that all nodes must fulfill. This work introduces LadonSpark, an open-source and non-commercial solution to configure and deploy a Spark cluster automatically. It has been specially designed for easy and efficient management of a Spark cluster with a friendly graphical user interface to automate the deployment of a cluster and to start up the distributed file system of Hadoop quickly. Moreover, LadonSpark includes the functionality of integrating any algorithm into the system. That is, the user only needs to provide the executable file and the number of required inputs for proper parametrization. Source codes developed in Scala, R, Python, or Java can be supported on LadonSpark. Besides, clustering, regression, classification, and association rules algorithms are already integrated so that users can test its usability from its initial installation.Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades TIN2017-88209-C2-1-

Efficient Distributed Outlier Detection in Data Streams

Anomaly detection is one of the major data mining tasks in modern applications. An element that shows significant deviation from the "usual" behavior is marked as an outlier. This means that this element either corresponds to noise or it requires more careful examination because it may be important. Also, many clustering algorithms are very sensitive to outliers. In any case, outliers must be identified and explored further, meaning that efficient outlier mining techniques are required. In this paper, we focus on distributed density-based outlier detection over multi-dimensional data streams. In particular, we focus on the approximation method for computing the Local Correlation Integral (LOCI) of multi-dimensional points. Each object p is assigned a score score(p) which represents the outlier score of p. Thus, one can select the top-k elements from the dataset that have the highest outlier scores. Our proposal has been implemented in Apache Spark using Scala and experiments have been conducted in a physical cluster running Apache Hadoop 2.7 and Apache Spark 2.4.0. Performance evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is efficient and scalable and therefore it can be used to mine outliers in large distributed datasets

Performance Evaluation of Job Scheduling and Resource Allocation in Apache Spark

Advancements in data acquisition techniques and devices are revolutionizing the way image data are collected, managed and processed. Devices such as time-lapse cameras and multispectral cameras generate large amount of image data daily. Therefore, there is a clear need for many organizations and researchers to deal with large volume of image data efficiently. On the other hand, Big Data processing on distributed systems such as Apache Spark are gaining popularity in recent years. Apache Spark is a widely used in-memory framework for distributed processing of large datasets on a cluster of inexpensive computers. This thesis proposes using Spark for distributed processing of large amount of image data in a time efficient manner. However, to share cluster resources efficiently, multiple image processing applications submitted to the cluster must be appropriately scheduled by Spark cluster managers to take advantage of all the compute power and storage capacity of the cluster. Spark can run on three cluster managers including Standalone, Mesos and YARN, and provides several configuration parameters that control how resources are allocated and scheduled. Using default settings for these multiple parameters is not enough to efficiently share cluster resources between multiple applications running concurrently. This leads to performance issues and resource underutilization because cluster administrators and users do not know which Spark cluster manager is the right fit for their applications and how the scheduling behaviour and parameter settings of these cluster managers affect the performance of their applications in terms of resource utilization and response times. This thesis parallelized a set of heterogeneous image processing applications including Image Registration, Flower Counter and Image Clustering, and presents extensive comparisons and analyses of running these applications on a large server and a Spark cluster using three different cluster managers for resource allocation, including Standalone, Apache Mesos and Hodoop YARN. In addition, the thesis examined the two different job scheduling and resource allocations modes available in Spark: static and dynamic allocation. Furthermore, the thesis explored the various configurations available on both modes that control speculative execution of tasks, resource size and the number of parallel tasks per job, and explained their impact on image processing applications. The thesis aims to show that using optimal values for these parameters reduces jobs makespan, maximizes cluster utilization, and ensures each application is allocated a fair share of cluster resources in a timely manner

A Distributed and Approximated Nearest Neighbors Algorithm for an Efficient Large Scale Mean Shift Clustering

In this paper we target the class of modal clustering methods where clusters are defined in terms of the local modes of the probability density function which generates the data. The most well-known modal clustering method is the k-means clustering. Mean Shift clustering is a generalization of the k-means clustering which computes arbitrarily shaped clusters as defined as the basins of attraction to the local modes created by the density gradient ascent paths. Despite its potential, the Mean Shift approach is a computationally expensive method for unsupervised learning. Thus, we introduce two contributions aiming to provide clustering algorithms with a linear time complexity, as opposed to the quadratic time complexity for the exact Mean Shift clustering. Firstly we propose a scalable procedure to approximate the density gradient ascent. Second, our proposed scalable cluster labeling technique is presented. Both propositions are based on Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) to approximate nearest neighbors. These two techniques may be used for moderate sized datasets. Furthermore, we show that using our proposed approximations of the density gradient ascent as a pre-processing step in other clustering methods can also improve dedicated classification metrics. For the latter, a distributed implementation, written for the Spark/Scala ecosystem is proposed. For all these considered clustering methods, we present experimental results illustrating their labeling accuracy and their potential to solve concrete problems.Comment: Algorithms are available at https://github.com/Clustering4Ever/Clustering4Eve