Continuous Nearest Neighbor Queries over Sliding Windows

Abstract—This paper studies continuous monitoring of nearest neighbor (NN) queries over sliding window streams. According to this model, data points continuously stream in the system, and they are considered valid only while they belong to a sliding window that contains 1) the W most recent arrivals (count-based) or 2) the arrivals within a fixed interval W covering the most recent time stamps (time-based). The task of the query processor is to constantly maintain the result of long-running NN queries among the valid data. We present two processing techniques that apply to both count-based and time-based windows. The first one adapts conceptual partitioning, the best existing method for continuous NN monitoring over update streams, to the sliding window model. The second technique reduces the problem to skyline maintenance in the distance-time space and precomputes the future changes in the NN set. We analyze the performance of both algorithms and extend them to variations of NN search. Finally, we compare their efficiency through a comprehensive experimental evaluation. The skyline-based algorithm achieves lower CPU cost, at the expense of slightly larger space overhead. Index Terms—Location-dependent and sensitive, spatial databases, query processing, nearest neighbors, data streams, sliding windows.

Parallel Continuous Preference Queries over Out-of-Order and Bursty Data Streams

Techniques to handle traffic bursts and out-of-order arrivals are of paramount importance to provide real-time sensor data analytics in domains like traffic surveillance, transportation management, healthcare and security applications. In these systems the amount of raw data coming from sensors must be analyzed by continuous queries that extract value-added information used to make informed decisions in real-time. To perform this task with timing constraints, parallelism must be exploited in the query execution in order to enable the real-time processing on parallel architectures. In this paper we focus on continuous preference queries, a representative class of continuous queries for decision making, and we propose a parallel query model targeting the efficient processing over out-of-order and bursty data streams. We study how to integrate punctuation mechanisms in order to enable out-of-order processing. Then, we present advanced scheduling strategies targeting scenarios with different burstiness levels, parameterized using the index of dispersion quantity. Extensive experiments have been performed using synthetic datasets and real-world data streams obtained from an existing real-time locating system. The experimental evaluation demonstrates the efficiency of our parallel solution and its effectiveness in handling the out-of-orderness degrees and burstiness levels of real-world applications

Distributed Indexing Schemes for k-Dominant Skyline Analytics on Uncertain Edge-IoT Data

Skyline queries typically search a Pareto-optimal set from a given data set to solve the corresponding multiobjective optimization problem. As the number of criteria increases, the skyline presumes excessive data items, which yield a meaningless result. To address this curse of dimensionality, we proposed a k-dominant skyline in which the number of skyline members was reduced by relaxing the restriction on the number of dimensions, considering the uncertainty of data. Specifically, each data item was associated with a probability of appearance, which represented the probability of becoming a member of the k-dominant skyline. As data items appear continuously in data streams, the corresponding k-dominant skyline may vary with time. Therefore, an effective and rapid mechanism of updating the k-dominant skyline becomes crucial. Herein, we proposed two time-efficient schemes, Middle Indexing (MI) and All Indexing (AI), for k-dominant skyline in distributed edge-computing environments, where irrelevant data items can be effectively excluded from the compute to reduce the processing duration. Furthermore, the proposed schemes were validated with extensive experimental simulations. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed MI and AI schemes reduced the computation time by approximately 13% and 56%, respectively, compared with the existing method.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures, 12 tables, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computin

Supporting Multi-Criteria Decision Support Queries over Disparate Data Sources

In the era of big data revolution, marked by an exponential growth of information, extracting value from data enables analysts and businesses to address challenging problems such as drug discovery, fraud detection, and earthquake predictions. Multi-Criteria Decision Support (MCDS) queries are at the core of big-data analytics resulting in several classes of MCDS queries such as OLAP, Top-K, Pareto-optimal, and nearest neighbor queries. The intuitive nature of specifying multi-dimensional preferences has made Pareto-optimal queries, also known as skyline queries, popular. Existing skyline algorithms however do not address several crucial issues such as performing skyline evaluation over disparate sources, progressively generating skyline results, or robustly handling workload with multiple skyline over join queries. In this dissertation we thoroughly investigate topics in the area of skyline-aware query evaluation. In this dissertation, we first propose a novel execution framework called SKIN that treats skyline over joins as first class citizens during query processing. This is in contrast to existing techniques that treat skylines as an add-on, loosely integrated with query processing by being placed on top of the query plan. SKIN is effective in exploiting the skyline characteristics of the tuples within individual data sources as well as across disparate sources. This enables SKIN to significantly reduce two primary costs, namely the cost of generating the join results and the cost of skyline comparisons to compute the final results. Second, we address the crucial business need to report results early; as soon as they are being generated so that users can formulate competitive decisions in near real-time. On top of SKIN, we built a progressive query evaluation framework ProgXe to transform the execution of queries involving skyline over joins to become non-blocking, i.e., to be progressively generating results early and often. By exploiting SKIN\u27s principle of processing query at multiple levels of abstraction, ProgXe is able to: (1) extract the output dependencies in the output spaces by analyzing both the input and output space, and (2) exploit this knowledge of abstract-level relationships to guarantee correctness of early output. Third, real-world applications handle query workloads with diverse Quality of Service (QoS) requirements also referred to as contracts. Time sensitive queries, such as fraud detection, require results to progressively output with minimal delay, while ad-hoc and reporting queries can tolerate delay. In this dissertation, by building on the principles of ProgXe we propose the Contract-Aware Query Execution (CAQE) framework to support the open problem of contract driven multi-query processing. CAQE employs an adaptive execution strategy to continuously monitor the run-time satisfaction of queries and aggressively take corrective steps whenever the contracts are not being met. Lastly, to elucidate the portability of the core principle of this dissertation, the reasoning and query processing at different levels of data abstraction, we apply them to solve an orthogonal research question to auto-generate recommendation queries that facilitate users in exploring a complex database system. User queries are often too strict or too broad requiring a frustrating trial-and-error refinement process to meet the desired result cardinality while preserving original query semantics. Based on the principles of SKIN, we propose CAPRI to automatically generate refined queries that: (1) attain the desired cardinality and (2) minimize changes to the original query intentions. In our comprehensive experimental study of each part of this dissertation, we demonstrate the superiority of the proposed strategies over state-of-the-art techniques in both efficiency, as well as resource consumption