Efficient Knowledge Extraction from Structured Data

Knowledge extraction from structured data aims for identifying valid, novel, potentially useful, and ultimately understandable patterns in the data. The core step of this process is the application of a data mining algorithm in order to produce an enumeration of particular patterns and relationships in large databases. Clustering is one of the major data mining tasks and aims at grouping the data objects into meaningful classes (clusters) such that the similarity of objects within clusters is maximized, and the similarity of objects from different clusters is minimized. In this thesis, we advance the state-of-the-art data mining algorithms for analyzing structured data types. We describe the development of innovative solutions for hierarchical data mining. The EM-based hierarchical clustering method ITCH (Information-Theoretic Cluster Hierarchies) is designed to propose solid solutions for four different challenges. (1) to guide the hierarchical clustering algorithm to identify only meaningful and valid clusters. (2) to represent each cluster content in the hierarchy by an intuitive description with e.g. a probability density function. (3) to consistently handle outliers. (4) to avoid difficult parameter settings. ITCH is built on a hierarchical variant of the information-theoretic principle of Minimum Description Length (MDL). Interpreting the hierarchical cluster structure as a statistical model of the dataset, it can be used for effective data compression by Huffman coding. Thus, the achievable compression rate induces a natural objective function for clustering, which automatically satisfies all four above mentioned goals. The genetic-based hierarchical clustering algorithm GACH (Genetic Algorithm for finding Cluster Hierarchies) overcomes the problem of getting stuck in a local optimum by a beneficial combination of genetic algorithms, information theory and model-based clustering. Besides hierarchical data mining, we also made contributions to more complex data structures, namely objects that consist of mixed type attributes and skyline objects. The algorithm INTEGRATE performs integrative mining of heterogeneous data, which is one of the major challenges in the next decade, by a unified view on numerical and categorical information in clustering. Once more, supported by the MDL principle, INTEGRATE guarantees the usability on real world data. For skyline objects we developed SkyDist, a similarity measure for comparing different skyline objects, which is therefore a first step towards performing data mining on this kind of data structure. Applied in a recommender system, for example SkyDist can be used for pointing the user to alternative car types, exhibiting a similar price/mileage behavior like in his original query. For mining graph-structured data, we developed different approaches that have the ability to detect patterns in static as well as in dynamic networks. We confirmed the practical feasibility of our novel approaches on large real-world case studies ranging from medical brain data to biological yeast networks. In the second part of this thesis, we focused on boosting the knowledge extraction process. We achieved this objective by an intelligent adoption of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). The GPUs have evolved from simple devices for the display signal preparation into powerful coprocessors that do not only support typical computer graphics tasks but can also be used for general numeric and symbolic computations. As major advantage, GPUs provide extreme parallelism combined with a high bandwidth in memory transfer at low cost. In this thesis, we propose algorithms for computationally expensive data mining tasks like similarity search and different clustering paradigms which are designed for the highly parallel environment of a GPU, called CUDA-DClust and CUDA-k-means. We define a multi-dimensional index structure which is particularly suited to support similarity queries under the restricted programming model of a GPU. We demonstrate the superiority of our algorithms running on GPU over their conventional counterparts on CPU in terms of efficiency

A framework for dynamic heterogeneous information networks change discovery based on knowledge engineering and data mining methods

Information Networks are collections of data structures that are used to model interactions in social and living phenomena. They can be either homogeneous or heterogeneous and static or dynamic depending upon the type and nature of relations between the network entities. Static, homogeneous and heterogenous networks have been widely studied in data mining but recently, there has been renewed interest in dynamic heterogeneous information networks (DHIN) analysis because the rich temporal, structural and semantic information is hidden in this kind of network. The heterogeneity and dynamicity of the real-time networks offer plenty of prospects as well as a lot of challenges for data mining. There has been substantial research undertaken on the exploration of entities and their link identification in heterogeneous networks. However, the work on the formal construction and change mining of heterogeneous information networks is still infant due to its complex structure and rich semantics. Researchers have used clusters-based methods and frequent pattern-mining techniques in the past for change discovery in dynamic heterogeneous networks. These methods only work on small datasets, only provide the structural change discovery and fail to consider the quick and parallel process on big data. The problem with these methods is also that cluster-based approaches provide the structural changes while the pattern-mining provide semantic characteristics of changes in a dynamic network. Another interesting but challenging problem that has not been considered by past studies is to extract knowledge from these semantically richer networks based on the user-specific constraint.This study aims to develop a new change mining system ChaMining to investigate dynamic heterogeneous network data, using knowledge engineering with semantic web technologies and data mining to overcome the problems of previous techniques, this system and approach are important in academia as well as real-life applications to support decision-making based on temporal network data patterns. This research has designed a novel framework “ChaMining” (i) to find relational patterns in dynamic networks locally and globally by employing domain ontologies (ii) extract knowledge from these semantically richer networks based on the user-specific (meta-paths) constraints (iii) Cluster the relational data patterns based on structural properties of nodes in the dynamic network (iv) Develop a hybrid approach using knowledge engineering, temporal rule mining and clustering to detect changes in the dynamic heterogeneous networks.The evidence is presented in this research shows that the proposed framework and methods work very efficiently on the benchmark big dynamic heterogeneous datasets. The empirical results can contribute to a better understanding of the rich semantics of DHIN and how to mine them using the proposed hybrid approach. The proposed framework has been evaluated with the previous six dynamic change detection algorithms or frameworks and it performs very well to detect microscopic as well as macroscopic human-understandable changes. The number of change patterns extracted in this approach was higher than the previous approaches which help to reduce the information loss