Abstract Feature selection (FS) is a key preprocessing step in data mining. 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.
As might be expected, filter-based FS algorithms have asymptotic complexities that depend on the number of features and or instances in a dataset. Many algorithms, such as the CFS, have quadratic complexities, while the most frequently used algorithms have at least linear complexities @cite_26 . This is why, in recent years, many attempts have been made to achieve more scalable FS methods. In what follows, we analyse recent work on the design of new scalable FS methods according to parallelization approaches: (i) search-oriented, (ii) dataset-split-oriented, or (iii) filter-oriented.
@cite_26
2952294252 2246516976 2063228777 2200550062
This paper describes a novel approach of packing sparse convolutional neural networks for their efficient systolic array implementations. By combining subsets of columns in the original filter matrix associated with a convolutional layer, we increase the utilization efficiency of the systolic array substantially (e.g., 4x) due to the increased density of nonzeros in the resulting packed filter matrix. In combining columns, for each row, all filter weights but one with the largest magnitude are pruned. We retrain the remaining weights to preserve high accuracy. We demonstrate that in mitigating data privacy concerns the retraining can be accomplished with only fractions of the original dataset (e.g., 10 for CIFAR-10). We study the effectiveness of this joint optimization for both high utilization and classification accuracy with ASIC and FPGA designs based on efficient bit-serial implementations of multiplier-accumulators. We present analysis and empirical evidence on the superior performance of our column combining approach against prior arts under metrics such as energy efficiency (3x) and inference latency (12x). This paper introduces a regularization method called Correlative Filter (CF) for Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), which takes advantage of the relevance between the convolutional kernels belonging to the same convolutional layer. During the process of training with the proposed CF method, several pairs of filters are designed in a manner of randomness to contain opposite weights in low-level layers. Regarding higher level layers where synthetical features are processed, the relation between correlative filters is explored as translation of various directions. The proposed CF method attempts to optimize the inner structure of convolutional layers and it can work jointly with other regularization techniques, such as stochastic pooling, Dropout, etc. The experimental results on the competitive image classification benchmark dataset CIFAR-10 demonstrates the performance of the proposed CF method, additionally, it is also verified that the proposed CF method is wonderful to be employed to enhance several state-of-the-art regularization models. The traditional collaborative filtering approaches have been shown to suffer from two fundamental problems: data sparsity and difficulty in scalability. To address these problems, we present a novel scalable item-based collaborative filtering method by using incremental update and local link prediction. By subdividing the computations and analyzing the factors in different cases of item-to-item similarity, we design the incremental update strategies in item-based CF, which can make the recommender system more efficient and scalable. Based on the transitive structure of item similarity graph, we use the local link prediction method to find implicit candidates to alleviate the lack of neighbors in predictions and recommendations caused by the sparsity of data. The experiment results validate that our algorithm can improve the performance of traditional CF, and can increase the efficiency in recommendations. There has been an increased growth in a number of applications that naturally generate large volumes of uncertain data. By the advent of such applications, the support of advanced analysis queries such as the skyline and its variant operators for big uncertain data has become important. In this paper, we propose the effective parallel algorithms using MapReduce to process the probabilistic skyline queries for uncertain data modeled by both discrete and continuous models. We present three filtering methods to identify probabilistic non-skyline objects in advance. We next develop a single MapReduce phase algorithm PS-QP-MR by utilizing space partitioning based on a variant of quadtrees to distribute the instances of objects effectively and the enhanced algorithm PS-QPF-MR by applying the three filtering methods additionally. We also propose the workload balancing technique to balance the workload of reduce functions based on the number of machines available. Finally, we present the brute-force algorithms PS-BR-MR and PS-BRF-MR with partitioning randomly and applying the filtering methods. In our experiments, we demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of PS-QPF-MR compared to the other algorithms.