Similarity measure models and algorithms for hierarchical cases

Many business situations such as events, products and services, are often described in a hierarchical structure. When we use case-based reasoning (CBR) techniques to support business decision-making, we require a hierarchical-CBR technique which can effectively compare and measure similarity between two hierarchical cases. This study first defines hierarchical case trees (HC-trees) and discusses related features. It then develops a similarity evaluation model which takes into account all the information on nodes' structures, concepts, weights, and values in order to comprehensively compare two hierarchical case trees. A similarity measure algorithm is proposed which includes a node concept correspondence degree computation algorithm and a maximum correspondence tree mapping construction algorithm, for HC-trees. We provide two illustrative examples to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed hierarchical case similarity evaluation model and algorithms, and possible applications in CBR systems. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Scaling Similarity Joins over Tree-Structured Data

Given a large collection of tree-structured objects (e.g., XML documents), the similarity join finds the pairs of objects that are similar to each other, based on a similarity threshold and a tree edit distance measure. The state-of-the-art similarity join methods compare simpler approximations of the objects (e.g., strings), in order to prune pairs that cannot be part of the similarity join result based on distance bounds derived by the approximations. In this paper, we propose a novel similarity join approach, which is based on the dynamic decomposition of the tree objects into subgraphs, according to the similarity threshold. Our technique avoids computing the exact distance between two tree objects, if the objects do not share at least one common subgraph. In order to scale up the join, the computed subgraphs are managed in a two-layer index. Our experimental results on real and synthetic data collections show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by up to an order of magnitude.published_or_final_versio

Tree Echo State Networks

In this paper we present the Tree Echo State Network (TreeESN) model, generalizing the paradigm of Reservoir Computing to tree structured data. TreeESNs exploit an untrained generalized recursive reservoir, exhibiting extreme efficiency for learning in structured domains. In addition, we highlight through the paper other characteristics of the approach: First, we discuss the Markovian characterization of reservoir dynamics, extended to the case of tree domains, that is implied by the contractive setting of the TreeESN state transition function. Second, we study two types of state mapping functions to map the tree structured state of TreeESN into a fixed-size feature representation for classification or regression tasks. The critical role of the relation between the choice of the state mapping function and the Markovian characterization of the task is analyzed and experimentally investigated on both artificial and real-world tasks. Finally, experimental results on benchmark and real-world tasks show that the TreeESN approach, in spite of its efficiency, can achieve comparable results with state-of-the-art, although more complex, neural and kernel based models for tree structured data

Online Analysis of Dynamic Streaming Data

Die Arbeit zum Thema "Online Analysis of Dynamic Streaming Data" beschäftigt sich mit der Distanzmessung dynamischer, semistrukturierter Daten in kontinuierlichen Datenströmen um Analysen auf diesen Datenstrukturen bereits zur Laufzeit zu ermöglichen. Hierzu wird eine Formalisierung zur Distanzberechnung für statische und dynamische Bäume eingeführt und durch eine explizite Betrachtung der Dynamik von Attributen einzelner Knoten der Bäume ergänzt. Die Echtzeitanalyse basierend auf der Distanzmessung wird durch ein dichte-basiertes Clustering ergänzt, um eine Anwendung des Clustering, einer Klassifikation, aber auch einer Anomalieerkennung zu demonstrieren. Die Ergebnisse dieser Arbeit basieren auf einer theoretischen Analyse der eingeführten Formalisierung von Distanzmessungen für dynamische Bäume. Diese Analysen werden unterlegt mit empirischen Messungen auf Basis von Monitoring-Daten von Batchjobs aus dem Batchsystem des GridKa Daten- und Rechenzentrums. Die Evaluation der vorgeschlagenen Formalisierung sowie der darauf aufbauenden Echtzeitanalysemethoden zeigen die Effizienz und Skalierbarkeit des Verfahrens. Zudem wird gezeigt, dass die Betrachtung von Attributen und Attribut-Statistiken von besonderer Bedeutung für die Qualität der Ergebnisse von Analysen dynamischer, semistrukturierter Daten ist. Außerdem zeigt die Evaluation, dass die Qualität der Ergebnisse durch eine unabhängige Kombination mehrerer Distanzen weiter verbessert werden kann. Insbesondere wird durch die Ergebnisse dieser Arbeit die Analyse sich über die Zeit verändernder Daten ermöglicht

Algoritmos de pré-processamento para uniformização de instâncias XML heterogêneas

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnológico. Programa de Pós-graduação em Ciência da ComputaçãoO aumento no volume de informações disponíveis na Web torna necessário sistemas cada vez mais práticos e eficientes na coleta e integração destas informações, para fins de consulta. Um dos formatos mais utilizados para disponibilizar as informações na Web é O XML. O XML, dada a sua natureza dinâmica, permite representações completas e adequadas dos mais diferentes domínios de dados. Ao mesmo tempo, esta natureza dinâmica lhe confere aspectos que tornam complexa a integração de dados neste formato. Este trabalho vem ao encontro deste problema, provendo um conjunto de técnicas de pré-processamento para uniformizar as estruturas de dados no formato XML. Esta uniformização, que busca respeitar a semântica dos dados, visa facilitar a comparação e posterior integração por abordagens já existentes para comparação e integração de dados. Através de estudos de caso e experimentos, demonstra-se como os pré-processamentos sugeridos influem positivamente nos resultados de trabalhos existentes

Efficient and Effective Similarity Search on Complex Objects

Due to the rapid development of computer technology and new methods for the extraction of data in the last few years, more and more applications of databases have emerged, for which an efficient and effective similarity search is of great importance. Application areas of similarity search include multimedia, computer aided engineering, marketing, image processing and many more. Special interest adheres to the task of finding similar objects in large amounts of data having complex representations. For example, set-valued objects as well as tree or graph structured objects are among these complex object representations. The grouping of similar objects, the so-called clustering, is a fundamental analysis technique, which allows to search through extensive data sets. The goal of this dissertation is to develop new efficient and effective methods for similarity search in large quantities of complex objects. Furthermore, the efficiency of existing density-based clustering algorithms is to be improved when applied to complex objects. The first part of this work motivates the use of vector sets for similarity modeling. For this purpose, a metric distance function is defined, which is suitable for various application ranges, but time-consuming to compute. Therefore, a filter refinement technology is suggested to efficiently process range queries and k-nearest neighbor queries, two basic query types within the field of similarity search. Several filter distances are presented, which approximate the exact object distance and can be computed efficiently. Moreover, a multi-step query processing approach is described, which can be directly integrated into the well-known density-based clustering algorithms DBSCAN and OPTICS. In the second part of this work, new application ranges for density-based hierarchical clustering using OPTICS are discussed. A prototype is introduced, which has been developed for these new application areas and is based on the aforementioned similarity models and accelerated clustering algorithms for complex objects. This prototype facilitates interactive semi-automatic cluster analysis and allows visual search for similar objects in multimedia databases. Another prototype extends these concepts and enables the user to analyze multi-represented and multi-instance data. Finally, the problem of music genre classification is addressed as another application supporting multi-represented and multi-instance data objects. An extensive experimental evaluation examines efficiency and effectiveness of the presented techniques using real-world data and points out advantages in comparison to conventional approaches

Efficient Similarity Search for Hierarchical Data in Large Databases

Structured and semi-structured object representations are getting more and more important for modern database applications. Examples for such data are hierarchical structures including chemical compounds, XML data or image data