23 research outputs found
Speculative Approximations for Terascale Analytics
Model calibration is a major challenge faced by the plethora of statistical
analytics packages that are increasingly used in Big Data applications.
Identifying the optimal model parameters is a time-consuming process that has
to be executed from scratch for every dataset/model combination even by
experienced data scientists. We argue that the incapacity to evaluate multiple
parameter configurations simultaneously and the lack of support to quickly
identify sub-optimal configurations are the principal causes. In this paper, we
develop two database-inspired techniques for efficient model calibration.
Speculative parameter testing applies advanced parallel multi-query processing
methods to evaluate several configurations concurrently. The number of
configurations is determined adaptively at runtime, while the configurations
themselves are extracted from a distribution that is continuously learned
following a Bayesian process. Online aggregation is applied to identify
sub-optimal configurations early in the processing by incrementally sampling
the training dataset and estimating the objective function corresponding to
each configuration. We design concurrent online aggregation estimators and
define halting conditions to accurately and timely stop the execution. We apply
the proposed techniques to distributed gradient descent optimization -- batch
and incremental -- for support vector machines and logistic regression models.
We implement the resulting solutions in GLADE PF-OLA -- a state-of-the-art Big
Data analytics system -- and evaluate their performance over terascale-size
synthetic and real datasets. The results confirm that as many as 32
configurations can be evaluated concurrently almost as fast as one, while
sub-optimal configurations are detected accurately in as little as a
fraction of the time
PF-OLA: A High-Performance Framework for Parallel On-Line Aggregation
Online aggregation provides estimates to the final result of a computation
during the actual processing. The user can stop the computation as soon as the
estimate is accurate enough, typically early in the execution. This allows for
the interactive data exploration of the largest datasets. In this paper we
introduce the first framework for parallel online aggregation in which the
estimation virtually does not incur any overhead on top of the actual
execution. We define a generic interface to express any estimation model that
abstracts completely the execution details. We design a novel estimator
specifically targeted at parallel online aggregation. When executed by the
framework over a massive TPC-H instance, the estimator provides
accurate confidence bounds early in the execution even when the cardinality of
the final result is seven orders of magnitude smaller than the dataset size and
without incurring overhead.Comment: 36 page
Parallel Online Aggregation in Action
ABSTRACT Online aggregation provides continuous estimates to the final result of a computation during the actual processing. The user can stop the computation as soon as the estimate is accurate enough, typically early in the execution, or can let the processing terminate and obtain the exact result. In this demonstration, we introduce a general framework for parallel online aggregation in which estimation does not incur overhead on top of the actual processing. We define a generic interface to express any estimation model that abstracts completely the execution details. We design multiple samplingbased estimators suited for parallel online aggregation and implement them inside the framework. Demonstration participants are shown how estimates to general SQL aggregation queries over terabytes of TPC-H data are generated during the entire processing. Due to parallel execution, the estimate converges to the correct result in a matter of seconds even for the most difficult queries. The behavior of the estimators is evaluated under different operating regimes of the distributed cluster used in the demonstration
A Data-Analysis and Sensitivity-Optimization Framework for the KATRIN Experiment
Presently under construction, the Karlsruhe TRitium Neutrino (KATRIN) experiment is the next generation tritium beta-decay experiment to perform a direct kinematical measurement of the electron neutrino mass with an unprecedented sensitivity of 200 meV (90% C.L.). This thesis describes the implementation of a consistent data analysis framework, addressing technical aspects of the data taking process and statistical challenges of a neutrino mass estimation from the beta-decay electron spectrum
Knowing when you're wrong: Building fast and reliable approximate query processing systems
Modern data analytics applications typically process massive amounts of data on clusters of tens, hundreds, or thousands of machines to support near-real-time decisions.The quantity of data and limitations of disk and memory bandwidth often make it infeasible to deliver answers at interactive speeds. However, it has been widely observed that many applications can tolerate some degree of inaccuracy. This is especially true for exploratory queries on data, where users are satisfied with "close-enough" answers if they can come quickly. A popular technique for speeding up queries at the cost of accuracy is to execute each query on a sample of data, rather than the whole dataset. To ensure that the returned result is not too inaccurate, past work on approximate query processing has used statistical techniques to estimate "error bars" on returned results. However, existing work in the sampling-based approximate query processing (S-AQP) community has not validated whether these techniques actually generate accurate error bars for real query workloads. In fact, we find that error bar estimation often fails on real world production workloads. Fortunately, it is possible to quickly and accurately diagnose the failure of error estimation for a query. In this paper, we show that it is possible to implement a query approximation pipeline that produces approximate answers and reliable error bars at interactive speeds.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (CISE Expeditions Award CCF-1139158)Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Award 7076018)United States. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (XData Award FA8750-12-2-0331)Amazon.com (Firm)Google (Firm)SAP CorporationThomas and Stacey Siebel FoundationApple Computer, Inc.Cisco Systems, Inc.Cloudera, Inc.EMC CorporationEricsson, Inc.Facebook (Firm
BlinkML: Efficient Maximum Likelihood Estimation with Probabilistic Guarantees
The rising volume of datasets has made training machine learning (ML) models
a major computational cost in the enterprise. Given the iterative nature of
model and parameter tuning, many analysts use a small sample of their entire
data during their initial stage of analysis to make quick decisions (e.g., what
features or hyperparameters to use) and use the entire dataset only in later
stages (i.e., when they have converged to a specific model). This sampling,
however, is performed in an ad-hoc fashion. Most practitioners cannot precisely
capture the effect of sampling on the quality of their model, and eventually on
their decision-making process during the tuning phase. Moreover, without
systematic support for sampling operators, many optimizations and reuse
opportunities are lost.
In this paper, we introduce BlinkML, a system for fast, quality-guaranteed ML
training. BlinkML allows users to make error-computation tradeoffs: instead of
training a model on their full data (i.e., full model), BlinkML can quickly
train an approximate model with quality guarantees using a sample. The quality
guarantees ensure that, with high probability, the approximate model makes the
same predictions as the full model. BlinkML currently supports any ML model
that relies on maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), which includes Generalized
Linear Models (e.g., linear regression, logistic regression, max entropy
classifier, Poisson regression) as well as PPCA (Probabilistic Principal
Component Analysis). Our experiments show that BlinkML can speed up the
training of large-scale ML tasks by 6.26x-629x while guaranteeing the same
predictions, with 95% probability, as the full model.Comment: 22 pages, SIGMOD 201
Database Learning: Toward a Database that Becomes Smarter Every Time
In today's databases, previous query answers rarely benefit answering future
queries. For the first time, to the best of our knowledge, we change this
paradigm in an approximate query processing (AQP) context. We make the
following observation: the answer to each query reveals some degree of
knowledge about the answer to another query because their answers stem from the
same underlying distribution that has produced the entire dataset. Exploiting
and refining this knowledge should allow us to answer queries more
analytically, rather than by reading enormous amounts of raw data. Also,
processing more queries should continuously enhance our knowledge of the
underlying distribution, and hence lead to increasingly faster response times
for future queries.
We call this novel idea---learning from past query answers---Database
Learning. We exploit the principle of maximum entropy to produce answers, which
are in expectation guaranteed to be more accurate than existing sample-based
approximations. Empowered by this idea, we build a query engine on top of Spark
SQL, called Verdict. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world query
traces from a large customer of a major database vendor. Our results
demonstrate that Verdict supports 73.7% of these queries, speeding them up by
up to 23.0x for the same accuracy level compared to existing AQP systems.Comment: This manuscript is an extended report of the work published in ACM
SIGMOD conference 201
The application of neural networks to anodic stripping voltammetry to improve trace metal analysis
This thesis describes a novel application of an artificial neural network and
links together the two diverse disciplines of electroanalytical chemistry and
information sciences.
The artificial neural network is used to process data obtained from a
Differential Pulse Anodic Stripping (DPAS) electroanalytical scan and produces as
an output, predictions of lead concentration in samples where the concentration is
less than 100 parts per billion.
A comparative study of several post analysis processing techniques is
presented, both traditional and neural. Through this it is demonstrated that by using
a neural network, both the accuracy and the precision of the concentration
predictions are increased by a factor of approximately two, over those obtained
using a traditional, peak height calibration curve method. Statistical justification for
these findings is provided
Furthermore it is shown that, by post processing with a neural network, good
quantitative predictions of heavy metal concentration may be made from instrument
responses so poor that, if using tradition methods of calibration, the analytical scan
would have had to be repeated.
As part of the research the author has designed and built a complete computer
controlled analytical instrument which provides output both to a graphical display
and to the neural network. This instrument, which is fully described in the text, is
operated via a mouse driven user interface written by the author