BigFCM: Fast, Precise and Scalable FCM on Hadoop

Clustering plays an important role in mining big data both as a modeling technique and a preprocessing step in many data mining process implementations. Fuzzy clustering provides more flexibility than non-fuzzy methods by allowing each data record to belong to more than one cluster to some degree. However, a serious challenge in fuzzy clustering is the lack of scalability. Massive datasets in emerging fields such as geosciences, biology and networking do require parallel and distributed computations with high performance to solve real-world problems. Although some clustering methods are already improved to execute on big data platforms, but their execution time is highly increased for large datasets. In this paper, a scalable Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) clustering named BigFCM is proposed and designed for the Hadoop distributed data platform. Based on the map-reduce programming model, it exploits several mechanisms including an efficient caching design to achieve several orders of magnitude reduction in execution time. Extensive evaluation over multi-gigabyte datasets shows that BigFCM is scalable while it preserves the quality of clustering

Elastic Business Process Management: State of the Art and Open Challenges for BPM in the Cloud

With the advent of cloud computing, organizations are nowadays able to react rapidly to changing demands for computational resources. Not only individual applications can be hosted on virtual cloud infrastructures, but also complete business processes. This allows the realization of so-called elastic processes, i.e., processes which are carried out using elastic cloud resources. Despite the manifold benefits of elastic processes, there is still a lack of solutions supporting them. In this paper, we identify the state of the art of elastic Business Process Management with a focus on infrastructural challenges. We conceptualize an architecture for an elastic Business Process Management System and discuss existing work on scheduling, resource allocation, monitoring, decentralized coordination, and state management for elastic processes. Furthermore, we present two representative elastic Business Process Management Systems which are intended to counter these challenges. Based on our findings, we identify open issues and outline possible research directions for the realization of elastic processes and elastic Business Process Management.Comment: Please cite as: S. Schulte, C. Janiesch, S. Venugopal, I. Weber, and P. Hoenisch (2015). Elastic Business Process Management: State of the Art and Open Challenges for BPM in the Cloud. Future Generation Computer Systems, Volume NN, Number N, NN-NN., http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2014.09.00

A Short Survey on Data Clustering Algorithms

With rapidly increasing data, clustering algorithms are important tools for data analytics in modern research. They have been successfully applied to a wide range of domains; for instance, bioinformatics, speech recognition, and financial analysis. Formally speaking, given a set of data instances, a clustering algorithm is expected to divide the set of data instances into the subsets which maximize the intra-subset similarity and inter-subset dissimilarity, where a similarity measure is defined beforehand. In this work, the state-of-the-arts clustering algorithms are reviewed from design concept to methodology; Different clustering paradigms are discussed. Advanced clustering algorithms are also discussed. After that, the existing clustering evaluation metrics are reviewed. A summary with future insights is provided at the end