Distributed context discovering for predictive modeling

Click prediction has applications in various areas such as advertising, search and online sales. Usually user-intent information such as query terms and previous click history is used in click prediction. However, this information is not always available. For example, there are no queries from users on the webpages of content publishers, such as personal blogs. The available information for click prediction in this scenario are implicitly derived from users, such as visiting time and IP address. Thus, the existing approaches utilizing user-intent information may be inapplicable in this scenario; and the click prediction problem in this scenario remains unexplored to our knowledge. In addition, the challenges in handling skewed data streams also exist in prediction, since there is often a heavy traffic on webpages and few visitors click on them. In this thesis, we propose to use the pattern-based classification approach to tackle the click prediction problem. Attributes in webpage visits are combined by a pattern mining algorithm to enhance their power in prediction. To make the pattern-based classification handle skewed data streams, we adopt a sliding window to capture recent data, and an undersampling technique to handle the skewness. As a side problem raised by the pattern-based approach, mining patterns from large datasets is addressed by a distributed pattern sampling algorithm proposed by us. This algorithm shows its scalability in experiments. We validate our pattern-based approach in click prediction on a real-world dataset from a Dutch portal website. The experiments show our pattern-based approach can achieve an average AUC of 0.675 over a period of 36 days with a 5-day sized sliding window, which surpasses the baseline, a statically trained classification model without patterns by 0.002. Besides, the average weighted F-measure of our approach is 0.009 higher than the baseline. Therefore, our proposed approach can slightly improve classification performance; yet whether this improvement worth deployment in real scenarios remains a question. Click prediction has applications in various areas such as advertising, search and online sales. Usually user-intent information such as query terms and previous click history is used in click prediction. However, this information is not always available. For example, there are no queries from users on the webpages of content publishers, such as personal blogs. The available information for click prediction in this scenario are implicitly derived from users, such as visiting time and IP address. Thus, the existing approaches utilizing user-intent information may be inapplicable in this scenario; and the click prediction problem in this scenario remains unexplored to our knowledge. In addition, the challenges in handling skewed data streams also exist in prediction, since there is often a heavy traffic on webpages and few visitors click on them. In this thesis, we propose to use the pattern-based classification approach to tackle the click prediction problem. Attributes in webpage visits are combined by a pattern mining algorithm to enhance their power in prediction. To make the pattern-based classification handle skewed data streams, we adopt a sliding window to capture recent data, and an undersampling technique to handle the skewness. As a side problem raised by the pattern-based approach, mining patterns from large datasets is addressed by a distributed pattern sampling algorithm proposed by us. This algorithm shows its scalability in experiments. We validate our pattern-based approach in click prediction on a real-world dataset from a Dutch portal website. The experiments show our pattern-based approach can achieve an average AUC of 0.675 over a period of 36 days with a 5-day sized sliding window, which surpasses the baseline, a statically trained classification model without patterns by 0.002. Besides, the average weighted F-measure of our approach is 0.009 higher than the baseline. Therefore, our proposed approach can slightly improve classification performance; yet whether this improvement worth deployment in real scenarios remains a question

Edge-based mining of frequent subgraphs from graph streams

In the current era of Big data, high volumes of valuable data can be generated at a high velocity from high-varieties of data sources in various real-life applications ranging from sensor networks to social networks, from bio-informatics to chemical informatics. In addition, Big data are also available in business, education, engineering, finance, healthcare, scientific, telecommunication, and transportation domains. A collection of these data can be viewed as a big dynamic graph structure. Embedded in them are implicit, previously unknown, and potentially useful knowledge. Consequently, efficient knowledge discovery algorithms for mining frequent subgraphs from these dynamic streaming graph structured data are in demand. On the one hand, some existing algorithms discover collections of frequently co-occurring edges, which may be disjoint. On the other hand, some other existing algorithms discover frequent subgraphs by requiring very large memory space. With high volumes of Big data, available memory space may be limited. To discover collections of frequently co-occurring connected edges, we present in this paper two efficient algorithms that require small memory space. Evaluation results show the efficiency of our edge-based algorithms in mining frequent subgraphs from graph streams

Frequent subgraph mining from streams of linked graph structured data

Nowadays, high volumes of high-value data (e.g., semantic web data) can be generated and published at a high velocity. A collection of these data can be viewed as a big, interlinked, dynamic graph structure of linked resources. Embedded in them are implicit, previously unknown, and potentially useful knowledge. Hence, ecient knowledge discovery algorithms for mining frequent subgraphs from these dynamic, streaming graph structured data are in demand. Some existing algorithms require very large memory space to discover frequent subgraphs; some others discover collections of frequently co-occurring edges (which may be disjoint). In contrast, we propose|in this paper|algorithms that use limited memory space for discovering collections of frequently co-occurring connected edges. Evaluation results show the effectiveness of our algorithms in frequent subgraph mining from streams of linked graph structured data

A new data stream mining algorithm for interestingness-rich association rules

Frequent itemset mining and association rule generation is a challenging task in data stream. Even though, various algorithms have been proposed to solve the issue, it has been found out that only frequency does not decides the significance interestingness of the mined itemset and hence the association rules. This accelerates the algorithms to mine the association rules based on utility i.e. proficiency of the mined rules. However, fewer algorithms exist in the literature to deal with the utility as most of them deals with reducing the complexity in frequent itemset/association rules mining algorithm. Also, those few algorithms consider only the overall utility of the association rules and not the consistency of the rules throughout a defined number of periods. To solve this issue, in this paper, an enhanced association rule mining algorithm is proposed. The algorithm introduces new weightage validation in the conventional association rule mining algorithms to validate the utility and its consistency in the mined association rules. The utility is validated by the integrated calculation of the cost/price efficiency of the itemsets and its frequency. The consistency validation is performed at every defined number of windows using the probability distribution function, assuming that the weights are normally distributed. Hence, validated and the obtained rules are frequent and utility efficient and their interestingness are distributed throughout the entire time period. The algorithm is implemented and the resultant rules are compared against the rules that can be obtained from conventional mining algorithms

Efficient itemset generator discovery over a stream sliding window

ABSTRACT Mining generator patterns has raised great research interest in recent years. The main purpose of mining itemset generators is that they can form equivalence classes together with closed itemsets, and can be used to generate simple classification rules according to the MDL principle. In this paper, we devise an efficient algorithm called StreamGen to mine frequent itemset generators over a stream sliding window. We adopt a novel enumeration tree structure to help keep the information of mined generators and the border between generators and non-generators, and propose some optimization techniques to speed up the mining process. We further extend the algorithm to directly mine a set of high quality classification rules over stream sliding windows while keeping high performance. The extensive performance study shows that our algorithm outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms which perform similar tasks in terms of both runtime and memory usage efficiency, and has high utility in terms of classification