Summarizing data with representative patterns

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.The advance of technology makes data acquisition and storage become unprecedentedly convenient. It contributes to the rapid growth of not only the volume but also the veracity and variety of data in recent years, which poses new challenges to the data mining area. For example, uncertain data mining emerges due to its capability to model the inherent veracity of data; spatial data mining attracts much research attention as the widespread of location-based services and wearable devices. As a fundamental topic of data mining, how to effectively and efficiently summarize data in this situation still remains to be explored. This thesis studied the problem of summarizing data with representative patterns. The objective is to find a set of patterns, which is much more concise but still contains rich information of the original data, and may provide valuable insights for further analysis of data. In the light of this idea, we formally formulate the problem and provide effective and efficient solutions in various scenarios. We study the problem of summarizing probabilistic frequent patterns over uncertain data. Probabilistic frequent pattern mining over uncertain data has received much research attention due to the wide applicabilities of uncertain data. It suffers from the problem of generating an exponential number of result patterns, which hinders the analysis of patterns and calls for the need to find a small number of representative patterns to approximate all other patterns. We formally formulate the problem of probabilistic representative frequent pattern (P-RFP) mining, which aims to find the minimal set of patterns with sufficiently high probability to represent all other patterns. The bottleneck turns out to be checking whether a pattern can probabilistically represent another, which involves the computation of a joint probability of the supports of two patterns. We propose a novel dynamic programming-based approach to address the problem and devise effective optimization strategies to improve the computation efficiency. To enhance the practicability of P-RFP mining, we introduce a novel approximation of the joint probability with both theoretical and empirical proofs. Based on the approximation, we propose an Approximate P-RFP Mining (APM) algorithm, which effectively and efficiently compresses the probabilistic frequent pattern set. The error rate of APM is guaranteed to be very small when the database contains hundreds of transactions, which further affirms that APM is a practical solution for summarizing probabilistic frequent patterns. We address the problem of directly summarizing uncertain transaction database by formulating the problem as Minimal Probabilistic Tile Cover Mining, which aims to find a high-quality probabilistic tile set covering an uncertain database with minimal cost. We define the concept of Probabilistic Price and Probabilistic Price Order to evaluate and compare the quality of tiles, and propose a framework to discover the minimal probabilistic tile cover. The bottleneck is to check whether a tile is better than another according to the Probabilistic Price Order, which involves the computation of a joint probability. We prove that it can be decomposed into independent terms and calculated efficiently. Several optimization techniques are devised to further improve the performance. We analyze the problem of summarizing co-locations mined from spatial databases. Co-location pattern mining finds patterns of spatial features whose instances tend to locate together in geographic space. However, the traditional framework of co-location pattern mining produces an exponential number of patterns because of the downward closure property, which makes it difficult for users to understand, assess or apply the huge number of resulted patterns. To address this issue, we study the problem of mining representative co-location patterns (RCP). We first define a covering relationship between two co-location patterns then formally formulate the problem of Representative Co-location Pattern mining. To solve the problem of RCP mining, we propose the RCPFast algorithm adopting the post-mining framework and the RCPMS algorithm pushing pattern summarization into the co-location mining process

Discrete Bakry-\'Emery curvature tensors and matrices of connection graphs

Connection graphs are natural extensions of Harary's signed graphs. The Bakry-\'Emery curvature of connection graphs has been introduced by Liu, M\"unch and Peyerimhoff in order to establish Buser type eigenvalue estimates for connection Laplacians. In this paper, we reformulate the Bakry-\'Emery curvature of a vertex in a connection graph in terms of the smallest eigenvalue of a family of unitarily equivalent curvature matrices. We further interpret this family of curvature matrices as the matrix representations of a new defined curvature tensor with respect to different orthonormal basis of the tangent space at a vertex. This is a strong extension of previous works of Cushing-Kamtue-Liu-Peyerimhoff and Siconolfi on curvature matrices of graphs. Moreover, we study the Bakry-\'Emery curvature of Cartesian products of connection graphs, strengthening the previous result of Liu, M\"unch and Peyerimhoff. While results of a vertex with locally balanced structure cover previous works, various interesting phenomena of locally unbalanced connection structure have been clarified.Comment: 57 pages,14 figures. All comments are welcome

Response to Midgley : the costs of reproduction cannot differ between the sexes

Non peer reviewe

StoryDroid: Automated Generation of Storyboard for Android Apps

Mobile apps are now ubiquitous. Before developing a new app, the development team usually endeavors painstaking efforts to review many existing apps with similar purposes. The review process is crucial in the sense that it reduces market risks and provides inspiration for app development. However, manual exploration of hundreds of existing apps by different roles (e.g., product manager, UI/UX designer, developer) in a development team can be ineffective. For example, it is difficult to completely explore all the functionalities of the app in a short period of time. Inspired by the conception of storyboard in movie production, we propose a system, StoryDroid, to automatically generate the storyboard for Android apps, and assist different roles to review apps efficiently. Specifically, StoryDroid extracts the activity transition graph and leverages static analysis techniques to render UI pages to visualize the storyboard with the rendered pages. The mapping relations between UI pages and the corresponding implementation code (e.g., layout code, activity code, and method hierarchy) are also provided to users. Our comprehensive experiments unveil that StoryDroid is effective and indeed useful to assist app development. The outputs of StoryDroid enable several potential applications, such as the recommendation of UI design and layout code

A COUPLED HYDRAULIC-MECHANICAL ELASTOPLASTIC CONSTITUTIVE MODEL FOR UNSATURATED SANDS AND SILTS

Unsaturated soils are three-phase porous media consisting of a solid skeleton, pore water, and pore air. It is well known that the behavior of unsaturated soils is influenced heavily by the matric suction (pore air pressure minus pore water pressure). Soil water characteristic curves (SWCCs) describe the relationship between matric suction and water content in unsaturated soils. In terms of constitutive modeling of soils, the relationship between matric suction and water content can be termed the hydraulic behavior of soils. SWCCs show hysteretic behavior depending on wetting/drying history of the soil. Recently geotechnical engineers have begun to notice that SWCCs also depend on the stress-strain history (mechanical behavior) of a soil. The hydraulic behavior of unsaturated soils, on the other hand, influences the mechanical behavior through matric suction. All of these facts, especially the coupling effects between hydraulic and mechanical behavior, demonstrate a very complex behavior of unsaturated soils.Unsaturated soils are prevalent in many parts of the world and geotechnical engineers are often called to predict the behavior of these structures such as the rainfall induced failure of a compacted soil slope. In order to predict the behavior of unsaturated soil geotechnical engineering structures, a hysteretic SWCCs model is first proposed based on the bounding surface plasticity concept. The hysteresis in SWCCs is modeled using concepts that parallel the elastoplastic theory used to model stress-strain behavior of soils. Matric suction is used as the stress variable and volume fraction of water or volumetric water content is used as the strain variable in modeling the SWCCs. This hysteretic SWCCs model is incorporated into a simple isotropic constitutive model to verify the proposed concepts that account for the coupling effects between hydraulic and mechanical behavior of unsaturated soils. Then a comprehensive constitutive model for unsaturated soils is developed in the general stress space. The rate equations of the proposed unsaturated soil model are integrated using a fully implicit integration scheme. Two sets of laboratory tests, one for Minco silt and another for Toyoura sand are used to calibrate and validate the model performance. The model is shown to capture the influence of stress-strain history on the SWCCs and the influence of SWCCs on the stress-strain behavior of silts and sands and predict the laboratory tests reasonably well

Intra- and intersexual interactions shape microbial community dynamics in the rhizosphere of Populus cathayana females and males exposed to excess Zn

In this study, we intended to investigate the responses of rhizospheric bacterial communities of Populus cathayana to excess Zn under different planting patterns. The results suggested that intersexual and intrasexual interactions strongly affect plant growth and Zn extraction in both sexes, as well as rhizosphere-associated bacterial com-munity structures. Females had a higher capacity of Zn accumulation and translocation than males under all planting patterns. Males had lower Zn accumulation and translocation under intersexual than under intrasexual interaction; the contrary was true for females. Females harbored abundant Streptomyces and Nocardioides in their rhizosphere, similarly to males under intersexual interaction, but differed from single-sex males under excess Zn. Conversely, intersexual interaction increased the abundance of key taxa Actinomycetales and Betaproteobacteria in both sexes exposed to excess Zn. Males improved the female rhizospheric microenvironment by increasing the abundance of some key tolerance taxa of Chloroflexi, Proteobacteria and Actinobacteria in both sexes under excess Zn in intersexual interaction. These results indicated that the sex of neighboring plants affected sexual differences in the choice of specific bacterial colonizations for phytoextraction and tolerance to Zn-contaminated soils, which might regulate the spatial segregation and phytoremediation potential of P. cathayana females and males under heavy metal contaminated soils.Peer reviewe

Plant sex affects plant-microbiome assemblies of dioecious Populus cathayana trees under different soil nitrogen conditions

Background: Dioecious plants have coevolved with diverse plant microbiomes, which are crucial for the fitness and productivity of their host. Sexual dimorphism in morphology, physiology, or gene expression may relate to different microbial compositions that affect male and female fitness in different environments. However, sex-specific impacts on ecological processes that control the microbiome assembly are not well known. In this study, Populus cathayana males and females were planted in different nitrogen conditions. It was hypothesized that males and females differently affect bacterial and fungal communities in the rhizosphere soil, roots, old leaves, and young leaves. Physiological traits and transcriptome profiles of male and female plants were investigated to reveal potential mechanisms that control the microbiome assembly. Results: Our results showed strong niche differentiation that shapes microbial communities leading to a rapid loss of diversity along a decreasing pH gradient from the rhizosphere soil to leaves. Sex had different impacts on the microbial assembly in each niche. Especially fungal endophytes showed great differences in the community structure, keystone species, and community complexity between P. cathayana males and females. For example, the fungal co-occurrence network was more complex and the alpha diversity was significantly higher in young female leaves compared to young male leaves. Transcriptome profiles revealed substantial differences in plant-pathogen interactions and physiological traits that clearly demonstrated divergent internal environments for endophytes inhabiting males and females. Starch and pH of young leaves significantly affected the abundance of Proteobacteria, while tannin and pH of roots showed significant effects on the abundance of Chloroflexi, Actinobacteria, and Proteobacteria, and on the bacterial Shannon diversity. Conclusion: Our results provided important knowledge for understanding sexual dimorphism that affects microbial assemblies, thus advancing our understanding of plant-microbiome interactions.Peer reviewe

Are males and females of Populus cathayana differentially sensitive to Cd stress?

This study clarifies the mechanisms of Cd uptake, translocation and detoxification in Populus cathayana Rehder females and males, and reveals a novel strategy for dioecious plants to cope with Cd contamination. Females exhibited a high degree of Cd uptake and root-to-shoot translocation, while males showed extensive Cd accumulation in roots, elevated antioxidative capacity, and effective cellular and bark Cd sequestration. Our study also found that Cd is largely located in epidermal and cortical tissues of male roots and leaves, while in females, more Cd was present in vascular tissues of roots and leaves, as well as in leaf mesophyll. In addition, the distributions of sulphur (S) and phosphorus (P) were very similar as that of Cd in males, but the associations were weak in females. Scanning electron microscopy and energy spectroscopy analyses suggested that the amounts of tissue Cd were positively correlated with P and S amounts in males, but not in females (a weak correlation between S and Cd). Transcriptional data suggested that Cd stress promoted the upregulation of genes related to Cd uptake and translocation in females, and that of genes related to cell wall biosynthesis, metal tolerance and secondary metabolism in males. Our results indicated that coordinated physiological, microstructural and transcriptional responses to Cd stress endowed superior Cd tolerance in males compared with females, and provided new insights into mechanisms underlying sexually differential responses to Cd stress.Peer reviewe