Indexing Metric Spaces for Exact Similarity Search

With the continued digitalization of societal processes, we are seeing an explosion in available data. This is referred to as big data. In a research setting, three aspects of the data are often viewed as the main sources of challenges when attempting to enable value creation from big data: volume, velocity and variety. Many studies address volume or velocity, while much fewer studies concern the variety. Metric space is ideal for addressing variety because it can accommodate any type of data as long as its associated distance notion satisfies the triangle inequality. To accelerate search in metric space, a collection of indexing techniques for metric data have been proposed. However, existing surveys each offers only a narrow coverage, and no comprehensive empirical study of those techniques exists. We offer a survey of all the existing metric indexes that can support exact similarity search, by i) summarizing all the existing partitioning, pruning and validation techniques used for metric indexes, ii) providing the time and storage complexity analysis on the index construction, and iii) report on a comprehensive empirical comparison of their similarity query processing performance. Here, empirical comparisons are used to evaluate the index performance during search as it is hard to see the complexity analysis differences on the similarity query processing and the query performance depends on the pruning and validation abilities related to the data distribution. This article aims at revealing different strengths and weaknesses of different indexing techniques in order to offer guidance on selecting an appropriate indexing technique for a given setting, and directing the future research for metric indexes

Scalable Graph Building from Text Data

International audienceIn this paper we propose NNCTPH, a new MapReduce algorithm that is able to build an approximate k-NN graph from large text datasets. The algorithm uses a modified version of Context Triggered Piecewise Hashing to bin the input data into buckets, and uses an exhaustive search inside the buckets to build the graph. It also uses multiple stages to join the different unconnected subgraphs. We experimentally test the algorithm on different datasets consisting of the subject of spam emails. Although the algorithm is still at an early development stage, it already proves to be four times faster than a MapReduce implementation of NN-Descent, for the same quality of produced graph

Efficient processing of similarity queries with applications

Today, a myriad of data sources, from the Internet to business operations to scientific instruments, produce large and different types of data. Many application scenarios, e.g., marketing analysis, sensor networks, and medical and biological applications, call for identifying and processing similarities in big data. As a result, it is imperative to develop new similarity query processing approaches and systems that scale from low dimensional data to high dimensional data, from single machine to clusters of hundreds of machines, and from disk-based to memory-based processing. This dissertation introduces and studies several similarity-aware query operators, analyzes and optimizes their performance. The first contribution of this dissertation is an SQL-based Similarity Group-by operator (SGB, for short) that extends the semantics of the standard SQL Group-by operator to group data with similar but not necessarily equal values. We realize these SGB operators by extending the Standard SQL Group-by and introduce two new SGB operators for multi-dimensional data. We implement and test the new SGB operators and their algorithms inside an open-source centralized database server (PostgreSQL). In the second contribution of this dissertation, we study how to efficiently process Hamming-distance-based similarity queries (Hamming-distance select and Hamming-distance join) that are crucial to many applications. We introduce a new index, termed the HA-Index, that speeds up distance comparisons and eliminates redundancies when performing the two flavors of Hamming distance range queries (namely, the selects and joins). In the third and last contribution of this dissertation, we develop a system for similarity query processing and optimization in an in-memory and distributed setup for big spatial data. We propose a query scheduler and a distributed query optimizer that use a new cost model to optimize the cost of similarity query processing in this in-memory distributed setup. The scheduler and query optimizer generates query execution plans that minimize the effect of query skew. The query scheduler employs new spatial indexing techniques based on bloom filters to forward queries to the appropriate local sites. The proposed query processing and optimization techniques are prototyped inside Spark, a distributed main-memory computation system

Table Augmentation in Data Lakes

Data lakes are centralized repositories that store large quantities of raw, unstructured, and structured data, allowing for ad-hoc data analysis, exploratory data analysis, and machine learning. However, the lack of metadata and schema in data lakes makes it challenging to work with tabular data and find related information stored in different tables. However, it is still an open problem how efficiently retrieve these tables at large scale when the settings of a data lake holds. The thesis introduces a novel approach to table augmentation that enables efficient data integration from multiple sources in a data lake. Table augmentation involves adding new data to an existing table in a horizontal fashion (by retrieving tables that can be horizontally concatenated to a query that serves as query table). The proposed approach consists of several components, including data lakes hashing, join search, similarity, and augmentation. The proposed approach is named TASH. TASH is a framework based on a spatial index in which tables are mapped and queried. Its goal is to identify the most useful columns for subsequent machine learning tasks. The table retrieval process employs a combination of set containment search and similarity search. Candidate tables are initially identified using set containment search and then ranked based on their similarity to the query. Experimental results demonstrate that TASH can effectively identify joinable tables and select the most relevant features, thereby enabling efficient table augmentation in data lakes. This research contributes to the field of big data by providing a practical solution to the challenges of data integration and analysis in data lake environments

Fast Data Analytics by Learning

Today, we collect a large amount of data, and the volume of the data we collect is projected to grow faster than the growth of the computational power. This rapid growth of data inevitably increases query latencies, and horizontal scaling alone is not sufficient for real-time data analytics of big data. Approximate query processing (AQP) speeds up data analytics at the cost of small quality losses in query answers. AQP produces query answers based on synopses of the original data. The sizes of the synopses are smaller than the original data; thus, AQP requires less computational efforts for producing query answers, thus can produce answers more quickly. In AQP, there is a general tradeoff between query latencies and the quality of query answers; obtaining higher-quality answers requires longer query latencies. In this dissertation, we show we can speed up the approximate query processing without reducing the quality of the query answers by optimizing the synopses using two approaches. The two approaches we employ for optimizing the synopses are as follows: 1. Exploiting past computations: We exploit the answers to the past queries. This approach relies on the fact that, if two aggregation involve common or correlated values, the aggregated results must also be correlated. We formally capture this idea using a probabilistic distribution function, which is then used to refine the answers to new queries. 2. Building task-aware synopses: By optimizing synopses for a few common types of data analytics, we can produce higher quality answers (or more quickly for certain target quality) to those data analytics tasks. We use this approach for constructing synopses optimized for searching and visualizations. For exploiting past computations and building task-aware synopses, our work incorporates statistical inference and optimization techniques. The contributions in this dissertation resulted in up to 20x speedups for real-world data analytics workloads.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138598/1/pyongjoo_1.pd