Diamond Dicing

In OLAP, analysts often select an interesting sample of the data. For example, an analyst might focus on products bringing revenues of at least 100 000 dollars, or on shops having sales greater than 400 000 dollars. However, current systems do not allow the application of both of these thresholds simultaneously, selecting products and shops satisfying both thresholds. For such purposes, we introduce the diamond cube operator, filling a gap among existing data warehouse operations. Because of the interaction between dimensions the computation of diamond cubes is challenging. We compare and test various algorithms on large data sets of more than 100 million facts. We find that while it is possible to implement diamonds in SQL, it is inefficient. Indeed, our custom implementation can be a hundred times faster than popular database engines (including a row-store and a column-store).Comment: 29 page

Pattern Mining and Sense-Making Support for Enhancing the User Experience

While data mining techniques such as frequent itemset and sequence mining are well established as powerful pattern discovery tools in domains from science, medicine to business, a detriment is the lack of support for interactive exploration of high numbers of patterns generated with diverse parameter settings and the relationships among the mined patterns. To enhance the user experience, real-time query turnaround times and improved support for interactive mining are desired. There is also an increasing interest in applying data mining solutions for mobile data. Patterns mined over mobile data may enable context-aware applications ranging from automating frequently repeated tasks to providing personalized recommendations. Overall, this dissertation addresses three problems that limit the utility of data mining, namely, (a.) lack of interactive exploration tools for mined patterns, (b.) insufficient support for mining localized patterns, and (c.) high computational mining requirements prohibiting mining of patterns on smaller compute units such as a smartphone. This dissertation develops interactive frameworks for the guided exploration of mined patterns and their relationships. Contributions include the PARAS pre- processing and indexing framework; enabling analysts to gain key insights into rule relationships in a parameter space view due to the compact storage of rules that enables query-time reconstruction of complete rulesets. Contributions also include the visual rule exploration framework FIRE that presents an interactive dual view of the parameter space and the rule space, that together enable enhanced sense-making of rule relationships. This dissertation also supports the online mining of localized association rules computed on data subsets by selectively deploying alternative execution strategies that leverage multidimensional itemset-based data partitioning index. Finally, we designed OLAPH, an on-device context-aware service that learns phone usage patterns over mobile context data such as app usage, location, call and SMS logs to provide device intelligence. Concepts introduced for modeling mobile data as sequences include compressing context logs to intervaled context events, adding generalized time features, and identifying meaningful sequences via filter expressions

Coping with new Challenges in Clustering and Biomedical Imaging

The last years have seen a tremendous increase of data acquisition in different scientific fields such as molecular biology, bioinformatics or biomedicine. Therefore, novel methods are needed for automatic data processing and analysis of this large amount of data. Data mining is the process of applying methods like clustering or classification to large databases in order to uncover hidden patterns. Clustering is the task of partitioning points of a data set into distinct groups in order to minimize the intra cluster similarity and to maximize the inter cluster similarity. In contrast to unsupervised learning like clustering, the classification problem is known as supervised learning that aims at the prediction of group membership of data objects on the basis of rules learned from a training set where the group membership is known. Specialized methods have been proposed for hierarchical and partitioning clustering. However, these methods suffer from several drawbacks. In the first part of this work, new clustering methods are proposed that cope with problems from conventional clustering algorithms. ITCH (Information-Theoretic Cluster Hierarchies) is a hierarchical clustering method that is based on a hierarchical variant of the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle which finds hierarchies of clusters without requiring input parameters. As ITCH may converge only to a local optimum we propose GACH (Genetic Algorithm for Finding Cluster Hierarchies) that combines the benefits from genetic algorithms with information-theory. In this way the search space is explored more effectively. Furthermore, we propose INTEGRATE a novel clustering method for data with mixed numerical and categorical attributes. Supported by the MDL principle our method integrates the information provided by heterogeneous numerical and categorical attributes and thus naturally balances the influence of both sources of information. A competitive evaluation illustrates that INTEGRATE is more effective than existing clustering methods for mixed type data. Besides clustering methods for single data objects we provide a solution for clustering different data sets that are represented by their skylines. The skyline operator is a well-established database primitive for finding database objects which minimize two or more attributes with an unknown weighting between these attributes. In this thesis, we define a similarity measure, called SkyDist, for comparing skylines of different data sets that can directly be integrated into different data mining tasks such as clustering or classification. The experiments show that SkyDist in combination with different clustering algorithms can give useful insights into many applications. In the second part, we focus on the analysis of high resolution magnetic resonance images (MRI) that are clinically relevant and may allow for an early detection and diagnosis of several diseases. In particular, we propose a framework for the classification of Alzheimer's disease in MR images combining the data mining steps of feature selection, clustering and classification. As a result, a set of highly selective features discriminating patients with Alzheimer and healthy people has been identified. However, the analysis of the high dimensional MR images is extremely time-consuming. Therefore we developed JGrid, a scalable distributed computing solution designed to allow for a large scale analysis of MRI and thus an optimized prediction of diagnosis. In another study we apply efficient algorithms for motif discovery to task-fMRI scans in order to identify patterns in the brain that are characteristic for patients with somatoform pain disorder. We find groups of brain compartments that occur frequently within the brain networks and discriminate well among healthy and diseased people

Advances in knowledge discovery and data mining Part II

19th Pacific-Asia Conference, PAKDD 2015, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, May 19-22, 2015, Proceedings, Part II</p

Scalable Mining of High-Utility Sequential Patterns With Three-Tier MapReduce Model

High-utility sequential pattern mining (HUSPM) is a hot research topic in recent decades since it combines both sequential and utility properties to reveal more information and knowledge rather than the traditional frequent itemset mining or sequential pattern mining. Several works of HUSPM have been presented but most of them are based on main memory to speed up mining performance. However, this assumption is not realistic and not suitable in large-scale environments since in real industry, the size of the collected data is very huge and it is impossible to fit the data into the main memory of a single machine. In this article, we first develop a parallel and distributed three-stage MapReduce model for mining high-utility sequential patterns based on large-scale databases. Two properties are then developed to hold the correctness and completeness of the discovered patterns in the developed framework. In addition, two data structures called sidset and utility-linked list are utilized in the developed framework to accelerate the computation for mining the required patterns. From the results, we can observe that the designed model has good performance in large-scale datasets in terms of runtime, memory, efficiency of the number of distributed nodes, and scalability compared to the serial HUSP-Span approach.acceptedVersio

Anonymizing large transaction data using MapReduce

Publishing transaction data is important to applications such as marketing research and biomedical studies. Privacy is a concern when publishing such data since they often contain person-specific sensitive information. To address this problem, different data anonymization methods have been proposed. These methods have focused on protecting the associated individuals from different types of privacy leaks as well as preserving utility of the original data. But all these methods are sequential and are designed to process data on a single machine, hence not scalable to large datasets. Recently, MapReduce has emerged as a highly scalable platform for data-intensive applications. In this work, we consider how MapReduce may be used to provide scalability in large transaction data anonymization. More specifically, we consider how setbased generalization methods such as RBAT (Rule-Based Anonymization of Transaction data) may be parallelized using MapReduce. Set-based generalization methods have some desirable features for transaction anonymization, but their highly iterative nature makes parallelization challenging. RBAT is a good representative of such methods. We propose a method for transaction data partitioning and representation. We also present two MapReduce-based parallelizations of RBAT. Our methods ensure scalability when the number of transaction records and domain of items are large. Our preliminary results show that a direct parallelization of RBAT by partitioning data alone can result in significant overhead, which can offset the gains from parallel processing. We propose MR-RBAT that generalizes our direct parallel method and allows to control parallelization overhead. Our experimental results show that MR-RBAT can scale linearly to large datasets and to the available resources while retaining good data utility