An experiment with association rules and classification: post-bagging and conviction

In this paper we study a new technique we call post-bagging, which consists in resampling parts of a classification model rather then the data. We do this with a particular kind of model: large sets of classification association rules, and in combination with ordinary best rule and weighted voting approaches. We empirically evaluate the effects of the technique in terms of classification accuracy. We also discuss the predictive power of different metrics used for association rule mining, such as confidence, lift, conviction and X². We conclude that, for the described experimental conditions, post-bagging improves classification results and that the best metric is conviction.Programa de Financiamento Plurianual de Unidades de I & D.Comunidade Europeia (CE). Fundo Europeu de Desenvolvimento Regional (FEDER).Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - POSI/SRI/39630/2001/Class Project

Incremental clustering of news reports

When an event occurs in the real world, numerous news reports describing this event start to appear on different news sites within a few minutes of the event occurrence. This may result in a huge amount of information for users, and automated processes may be required to help manage this information. In this paper, we describe a clustering system that can cluster news reports from disparate sources into event-centric clusters—i.e., clusters of news reports describing the same event. A user can identify any RSS feed as a source of news he/she would like to receive and our clustering system can cluster reports received from the separate RSS feeds as they arrive without knowing the number of clusters in advance. Our clustering system was designed to function well in an online incremental environment. In evaluating our system, we found that our system is very good in performing fine-grained clustering, but performs rather poorly when performing coarser-grained clustering.peer-reviewe

Dimensionality Reduction and Subspace Clustering in Mixed Reality for Condition Monitoring of High-Dimensional Production Data

Visual analytics are becoming more and more important in the light of big data and related scenarios. Along this trend, the field of immersive analytics has been variously furthered as it is able to provide sophisticated visual data analytics on one hand, while preserving user-friendliness on the other. Furthermore, recent hardware developments like smart glasses, as well as achievements in virtual-reality applications, have fanned immersive analytic solutions. Notably, such solutions can be very effective when they are applied to high-dimensional data sets. Taking this advantage into account, the work at hand applies immersive analytics to a high-dimensional production data set in order to improve the digital support of daily work tasks. More specifically, a mixed-reality implementation is presented that shall support manufactures as well as data scientists to comprehensively analyze machine data. As a particular goal, the prototype shall simplify the analysis of manufacturing data through the usage of dimensionality reduction effects. Therefore, five aspects are mainly reported in this paper. First, it is shown how dimensionality reduction effects can be represented by clusters. Second, it is presented how the resulting information loss of the reduction is addressed. Third, the graphical interface of the developed prototype is illustrated as it provides a (1) correlation coefficient graph, a (2) plot for the information loss, and a (3) 3D particle system. In addition, an implemented voice recognition feature of the prototype is shown, which was considered as being promising to select or deselect data variables users are interested in when analyzing the data. Fourth, based on a machine learning library, it is shown how the prototype reduces computational resources by the use of smart glasses. The main idea is based on a recommendation approach as well as the use of subspace clustering. Fifth, results from a practical setting are presented, in which the prototype was shown to domain experts. The latter reported that such a tool is actually helpful to analyze machine data on a daily basis. Moreover, it was reported that such system can be used to educate machine operators more properly. As a general outcome of this work, the presented approach may constitute a helpful solution for the industry as well as other domains like medicine

Defining Interestigness for Association Rules

Interestingness in Association Rules has been a major topic of research in the past decade. The reason is that the strength of association rules, i.e. its ability to discover ALL patterns given some thresholds on support and confidence, is also its weakness. Indeed, a typical association rules analysis on real data often results in hundreds or thousands of patterns creating a data mining problem of the second order. In other words, it is not straightforward to determine which of those rules are interesting for the end-user. This paper provides an overview of some existing measures of interestingness and we will comment on their properties. In general, interestingness measures can be divided into objective and subjective measures. Objective measures tend to express interestingness by means of statistical or mathematical criteria, whereas subjective measures of interestingness aim at capturing more practical criteria that should be taken into account, such as unexpectedness or actionability of rules. This paper only focusses on objective measures of interestingness

Menetelmiä mielenkiintoisten solmujen löytämiseen verkostoista

With the increasing amount of graph-structured data available, finding interesting objects, i.e., nodes in graphs, becomes more and more important. In this thesis we focus on finding interesting nodes and sets of nodes in graphs or networks. We propose several definitions of node interestingness as well as different methods to find such nodes. Specifically, we propose to consider nodes as interesting based on their relevance and non-redundancy or representativeness w.r.t. the graph topology, as well as based on their characterisation for a class, such as a given node attribute value. Identifying nodes that are relevant, but non-redundant to each other is motivated by the need to get an overview of different pieces of information related to a set of given nodes. Finding representative nodes is of interest, e.g. when the user needs or wants to select a few nodes that abstract the large set of nodes. Discovering nodes characteristic for a class helps to understand the causes behind that class. Next, four methods are proposed to find a representative set of interesting nodes. The first one incrementally picks one interesting node after another. The second iteratively changes the set of nodes to improve its overall interestingness. The third method clusters nodes and picks a medoid node as a representative for each cluster. Finally, the fourth method contrasts diverse sets of nodes in order to select nodes characteristic for their class, even if the classes are not identical across the selected nodes. The first three methods are relatively simple and are based on the graph topology and a similarity or distance function for nodes. For the second and third, the user needs to specify one parameter, either an initial set of k nodes or k, the size of the set. The fourth method assumes attributes and class attributes for each node, a class-related interesting measure, and possible sets of nodes which the user wants to contrast, such as sets of nodes that represent different time points. All four methods are flexible and generic. They can, in principle, be applied on any weighted graph or network regardless of what nodes, edges, weights, or attributes represent. Application areas for the methods developed in this thesis include word co-occurrence networks, biological networks, social networks, data traffic networks, and the World Wide Web. As an illustrating example, consider a word co-occurrence network. There, finding terms (nodes in the graph) that are relevant to some given nodes, e.g. branch and root, may help to identify different, shared contexts such as botanics, mathematics, and linguistics. A real life application lies in biology where finding nodes (biological entities, e.g. biological processes or pathways) that are relevant to other, given nodes (e.g. some genes or proteins) may help in identifying biological mechanisms that are possibly shared by both the genes and proteins.Väitöskirja käsittelee verkostojen louhinnan menetelmiä. Sen tavoitteena on löytää mielenkiintoisia tietoja painotetuista verkoista. Painotettuna verkkona voi tarkastella esim. tekstiainestoja, biologisia ainestoja, ihmisten välisiä yhteyksiä tai internettiä. Tällaisissa verkoissa solmut edustavat käsitteitä (esim. sanoja, geenejä, ihmisiä tai internetsivuja) ja kaaret niiden välisiä suhteita (esim. kaksi sanaa esiintyy samassa lauseessa, geeni koodaa proteiinia, ihmisten ystävyyksiä tai internetsivu viittaa toiseen internetsivuun). Kaarten painot voivat vastata esimerkiksi yhteyden voimakuutta tai luotettavuutta. Väitöskirjassa esitetään erilaisia verkon rakenteeseen tai solmujen attribuutteihin perustuvia määritelmiä solmujen mielenkiintoisuudelle sekä useita menetelmiä mielenkiintoisten solmujen löytämiseksi. Mielenkiintoisuuden voi määritellä esim. merkityksellisyytenä suhteessa joihinkin annettuihin solmuihin ja toisaalta mielenkiintoisten solmujen keskinäisenä erilaisuutena. Esimerkiksi ns. ahneella menetelmällä voidaan löytää keskenään erilaisia solmuja yksi kerrallaan. Väitöskirjan tuloksia voidaan soveltaa esimerkiksi tekstiaineistoa käsittelemällä saatuun sanojen väliseen verkostoon, jossa kahden sanan välillä on sitä voimakkaampi yhteys mitä useammin ne tapaavat esiintyä keskenään samoissa lauseissa. Sanojen erilaisia käyttöyhteyksiä ja jopa merkityksiä voidaan nyt löytää automaattisesti. Jos kohdesanaksi otetaan vaikkapa "juuri", niin siihen liittyviä mutta keskenään toisiinsa liittymättömiä sanoja ovat "puu" (biologinen merkitys: kasvin juuri), "yhtälö" (matemaattinen merkitys: yhtälön ratkaisu eli juuri) sekä "indoeurooppalainen" (kielitieteellinen merkitys: sanan vartalo eli juuri). Tällaisia menetelmiä voidaan soveltaa esimerkiksi hakukoneessa: sanalla "juuri" tehtyihin hakutuloksiin sisällytetään tuloksia mahdollisimman erilaisista käyttöyhteyksistä, jotta käyttäjän tarkoittama merkitys tulisi todennäköisemmin katetuksi hakutuloksissa. Merkittävä sovelluskohde väitöskirjan menetelmille ovat biologiset verkot, joissa solmut edustavat biologisia käsitteitä (esim. geenejä, proteiineja tai sairauksia) ja kaaret niiden välisiä suhteita (esim. geeni koodaa proteiinia tai proteiini on aktiivinen tietyssä sairauksessa). Menetelmillä voidaan etsiä esimerkiksi sairauksiin vaikuttavia biologisia mekanismeja paikantamalla edustava joukko sairauteen ja siihen mahdollisesti liittyviin geeneihin verkostossa kytkeytyviä muita solmuja. Nämä voivat auttaa biologeja ymmärtämään geenien ja sairauden mahdollisia kytköksiä ja siten kohdentamaan jatkotutkimustaan lupaavimpiin geeneihin, proteiineihin tms. Väitöskirjassa esitetyt solmujen mielenkiintoisuuden määritelmät sekä niiden löytämiseen ehdotetut menetelmät ovat yleispäteviä ja niitä voi soveltaa periaatteessa mihin tahansa verkkoon riippumatta siitä, mitä solmut, kaaret tai painot edustavat. Kokeet erilaisilla verkoilla osoittavat että ne löytävät mielenkiintoisia solmuja