53 research outputs found
Generating Preview Tables for Entity Graphs
Users are tapping into massive, heterogeneous entity graphs for many
applications. It is challenging to select entity graphs for a particular need,
given abundant datasets from many sources and the oftentimes scarce information
for them. We propose methods to produce preview tables for compact presentation
of important entity types and relationships in entity graphs. The preview
tables assist users in attaining a quick and rough preview of the data. They
can be shown in a limited display space for a user to browse and explore,
before she decides to spend time and resources to fetch and investigate the
complete dataset. We formulate several optimization problems that look for
previews with the highest scores according to intuitive goodness measures,
under various constraints on preview size and distance between preview tables.
The optimization problem under distance constraint is NP-hard. We design a
dynamic-programming algorithm and an Apriori-style algorithm for finding
optimal previews. Results from experiments, comparison with related work and
user studies demonstrated the scoring measures' accuracy and the discovery
algorithms' efficiency.Comment: This is the camera-ready version of a SIGMOD16 paper. There might be
tiny differences in layout, spacing and linebreaking, compared with the
version in the SIGMOD16 proceedings, since we must submit TeX files and use
arXiv to compile the file
XML Reconstruction View Selection in XML Databases: Complexity Analysis and Approximation Scheme
Query evaluation in an XML database requires reconstructing XML subtrees
rooted at nodes found by an XML query. Since XML subtree reconstruction can be
expensive, one approach to improve query response time is to use reconstruction
views - materialized XML subtrees of an XML document, whose nodes are
frequently accessed by XML queries. For this approach to be efficient, the
principal requirement is a framework for view selection. In this work, we are
the first to formalize and study the problem of XML reconstruction view
selection. The input is a tree , in which every node has a size
and profit , and the size limitation . The target is to find a subset
of subtrees rooted at nodes respectively such that
, and is maximal.
Furthermore, there is no overlap between any two subtrees selected in the
solution. We prove that this problem is NP-hard and present a fully
polynomial-time approximation scheme (FPTAS) as a solution
Hypothetical Reasoning via Provenance Abstraction
Data analytics often involves hypothetical reasoning: repeatedly modifying
the data and observing the induced effect on the computation result of a
data-centric application. Previous work has shown that fine-grained data
provenance can help make such an analysis more efficient: instead of a costly
re-execution of the underlying application, hypothetical scenarios are applied
to a pre-computed provenance expression. However, storing provenance for
complex queries and large-scale data leads to a significant overhead, which is
often a barrier to the incorporation of provenance-based solutions.
To this end, we present a framework that allows to reduce provenance size.
Our approach is based on reducing the provenance granularity using user defined
abstraction trees over the provenance variables; the granularity is based on
the anticipated hypothetical scenarios. We formalize the tradeoff between
provenance size and supported granularity of the hypothetical reasoning, and
study the complexity of the resulting optimization problem, provide efficient
algorithms for tractable cases and heuristics for others. We experimentally
study the performance of our solution for various queries and abstraction
trees. Our study shows that the algorithms generally lead to substantial
speedup of hypothetical reasoning, with a reasonable loss of accuracy
Information Discovery on Electronic Health Records Using Authority Flow Techniques
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>As the use of electronic health records (EHRs) becomes more widespread, so does the need to search and provide effective information discovery within them. Querying by keyword has emerged as one of the most effective paradigms for searching. Most work in this area is based on traditional Information Retrieval (IR) techniques, where each document is compared individually against the query. We compare the effectiveness of two fundamentally different techniques for keyword search of EHRs.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We built two ranking systems. The traditional BM25 system exploits the EHRs' content without regard to association among entities within. The Clinical ObjectRank (CO) system exploits the entities' associations in EHRs using an authority-flow algorithm to discover the most relevant entities. BM25 and CO were deployed on an EHR dataset of the cardiovascular division of Miami Children's Hospital. Using sequences of keywords as queries, sensitivity and specificity were measured by two physicians for a set of 11 queries related to congenital cardiac disease.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Our pilot evaluation showed that CO outperforms BM25 in terms of sensitivity (65% vs. 38%) by 71% on average, while maintaining the specificity (64% vs. 61%). The evaluation was done by two physicians.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Authority-flow techniques can greatly improve the detection of relevant information in EHRs and hence deserve further study.</p
Tractable XML data exchange via relations
We consider data exchange for XML documents: given source and target schemas, a mapping between them, and a document conforming to the source schema, construct a target document and answer target queries in a way that is consistent with source information. The problem has primarily been studied in the relational context, in which data-exchange systems have also been built. Since many XML documents are stored in relations, it is natural to consider using a relational system for XML data exchange. However, there is a complexity mismatch between query answering in relational and XML data exchange, which indicates that restrictions have to be imposed on XML schemas and mappings, and on XML shredding schemes, to make the use of relational systems possible. We isolate a set of five requirements that must be fulfilled in order to have a faithful representation of the XML data-exchange problem by a relational translation. We then demonstrate that these requirements naturally suggest the inlining technique for dataexchange tasks. Our key contribution is to provide shredding algorithms for schemas, documents, mappings and queries, and demonstrate that they enable us to correctly perform XML data-exchange tasks using a relational system
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