Parallel Graph Partitioning for Complex Networks

Processing large complex networks like social networks or web graphs has recently attracted considerable interest. In order to do this in parallel, we need to partition them into pieces of about equal size. Unfortunately, previous parallel graph partitioners originally developed for more regular mesh-like networks do not work well for these networks. This paper addresses this problem by parallelizing and adapting the label propagation technique originally developed for graph clustering. By introducing size constraints, label propagation becomes applicable for both the coarsening and the refinement phase of multilevel graph partitioning. We obtain very high quality by applying a highly parallel evolutionary algorithm to the coarsened graph. The resulting system is both more scalable and achieves higher quality than state-of-the-art systems like ParMetis or PT-Scotch. For large complex networks the performance differences are very big. For example, our algorithm can partition a web graph with 3.3 billion edges in less than sixteen seconds using 512 cores of a high performance cluster while producing a high quality partition -- none of the competing systems can handle this graph on our system.Comment: Review article. Parallelization of our previous approach arXiv:1402.328

Massively-Parallel Feature Selection for Big Data

We present the Parallel, Forward-Backward with Pruning (PFBP) algorithm for feature selection (FS) in Big Data settings (high dimensionality and/or sample size). To tackle the challenges of Big Data FS PFBP partitions the data matrix both in terms of rows (samples, training examples) as well as columns (features). By employing the concepts of $p$-values of conditional independence tests and meta-analysis techniques PFBP manages to rely only on computations local to a partition while minimizing communication costs. Then, it employs powerful and safe (asymptotically sound) heuristics to make early, approximate decisions, such as Early Dropping of features from consideration in subsequent iterations, Early Stopping of consideration of features within the same iteration, or Early Return of the winner in each iteration. PFBP provides asymptotic guarantees of optimality for data distributions faithfully representable by a causal network (Bayesian network or maximal ancestral graph). Our empirical analysis confirms a super-linear speedup of the algorithm with increasing sample size, linear scalability with respect to the number of features and processing cores, while dominating other competitive algorithms in its class

Distributed Correlation-Based Feature Selection in Spark

CFS (Correlation-Based Feature Selection) is an FS algorithm that has been successfully applied to classification problems in many domains. We describe Distributed CFS (DiCFS) as a completely redesigned, scalable, parallel and distributed version of the CFS algorithm, capable of dealing with the large volumes of data typical of big data applications. Two versions of the algorithm were implemented and compared using the Apache Spark cluster computing model, currently gaining popularity due to its much faster processing times than Hadoop's MapReduce model. We tested our algorithms on four publicly available datasets, each consisting of a large number of instances and two also consisting of a large number of features. The results show that our algorithms were superior in terms of both time-efficiency and scalability. In leveraging a computer cluster, they were able to handle larger datasets than the non-distributed WEKA version while maintaining the quality of the results, i.e., exactly the same features were returned by our algorithms when compared to the original algorithm available in WEKA.Comment: 25 pages, 5 figure