12616557
Simultaneously modeling semantics and structure of threaded discussions: a sparse coding approach and its applications
The huge amount of knowledge in web communities has motivated the research interests in threaded discussions. The dynamic nature of threaded discussions poses lots of challenging problems for computer scientists. Although techniques such as semantic models and structural models have been shown to be useful in a number of areas, they are inefficient in understanding threaded discussions due to three reasons: (I) as most of users read existing messages before posting, posts in a discussion thread are temporally dependent on the previous ones; It causes the semantics and structure to be coupled with each other in threaded discussions; (II) in online discussion threads, there are a lot of junk posts which are useless and may disturb content analysis; and (III) it is very hard to judge the quality of a post. In this paper, we propose a sparse coding-based model named SMSS to Simultaneously Model Semantics and Structure of threaded discussions. The model projects each post into a topic space, and approximates each post by a linear combination of previous posts in the same discussion thread. Meanwhile, the model also imposes two sparse constraints to force a sparse post reconstruction in the topic space and a sparse post approximation from previous posts. The sparse properties effectively take into account the characteristics of threaded discussions. Towards the above three problems, we demonstrate the competency of our model in three applications: reconstructing reply structure of threaded discussions, identifying junk posts, and finding experts in a given board/sub-board in web communities. Experimental results show encouraging performance of the proposed SMSS model in all these applications.
8249361
SUDEPHIC: Self-Tuning Density-Based Partitioning and Hierarchical Clustering
Clustering is one of the primary techniques in data mining, for which to find the user expecting result is a major issue. However, to dynamically specify the parameters for clustering algorithms presents an obstacle for users. This paper firstly introduces a novel density-based partitioning and hierarchical algorithm, which makes it easy to employ synthetic feedback mechanism in clustering. Additionally, by investigating into the relation between parameters and the clustering result, we propose a self-tuning technique for the setting of parameters. Meanwhile, the density distribution within a cluster can be expressed in the result for the user to specify the cluster’s feature. The algorithm is both evaluated in theory and practice. It outperforms many existing algorithms both in efficiency and quality.
207162632
Utility-based anonymization for privacy preservation with less information loss
Privacy becomes a more and more serious concern in applications involving microdata. Recently, efficient anonymization has attracted much research work. Most of the previous methods use global recoding, which maps the domains of the quasi-identifier attributes to generalized or changed values. However, global recoding may not always achieve effective anonymization in terms of discernability and query answering accuracy using the anonymized data. Moreover, anonymized data is often used for analysis. As well accepted in many analytical applications, different attributes in a data set may have different utility in the analysis. The utility of attributes has not been considered in the previous methods.
 In this paper, we study the problem of utility-based anonymization. First, we propose a simple framework to specify utility of attributes. The framework covers both numeric and categorical data. Second, we develop two simple yet efficient heuristic local recoding methods for utility-based anonymization. Our extensive performance study using both real data sets and synthetic data sets shows that our methods outperform the state-of-the-art multidimensional global recoding methods in both discernability and query answering accuracy. Furthermore, our utility-based method can boost the quality of analysis using the anonymized data.
14792668
Personalization as a service: the architecture and a case study
Cloud computing has become a hot topic in the IT industry. Great efforts have been made to establish cloud computing platforms for enterprise users, mostly small businesses. However, there are few researches about the impact of cloud computing over individual users. In this paper we focus on how to provide personalized services for individual users in the cloud environment. We argue that a personalized cloud service shall compose of two parts. The client side program records user activities on personal de-vices such as PC. Besides that, the user model is also computed on the client side to avoid server overhead. The cloud side program fetches the user model periodically and adjusts its results accordingly. We build a personalized cloud data search engine prototype to prove our idea.
30881426
Constraint-Based Graph Mining in Large Database
Currently, constraints are increasingly considered as a kind of means of user- or expert-control for filtering those unsatisfied and redundant patterns rapidly during the web mining process. Recent work has highlighted the importance of constraint-based mining paradigm in the context of frequent itemsets, sequences, and many other interesting patterns in large database. However, it is still not clear how to push various constraints systematically into graph mining process. In this paper, we categorize various graph-based constraints into several major classes and develop a framework CabGin (i.e. C onstr a int- b ased G raph M in ing) to push them into mining process by their categories. Non-monotonic aggregates like average also can be pushed into CabGin with minor revision. Experimental results show that CabGin can prunes a large search space effectively by pushing graph-based constraints into mining process.
10409272
Repairing Inconsistent XML Documents
XML document may contain inconsistencies that violate predefined integrity constraints, and there are two basic concepts for this problem: Repair is the data consistent with the integrity constraints, and also minimally differs from the original one. Consistent data is the data common for every possible repair. In this paper, first we give a general constraint model for XML, which can express functional dependencies, keys and multivalued dependencies. Next we provide a repair framework for inconsistent XML document with three basic update operations: node insertion, node deletion and value modification. Following this approach, we introduce the concept of repair for inconsistent XML document, discuss the chase process to generate repairs, and prove some important properties of the chase process. Finally we give a method to obtain the greatest lower bound of all possible repairs, which is sufficient for consistent data.
9745553
Identification of family-specific residue packing motifs and their use for structure-based protein function prediction: I. Method development
Protein function prediction is one of the central problems in computational biology. We present a novel automated protein structure-based function prediction method using libraries of local residue packing patterns that are common to most proteins in a known functional family. Critical to this approach is the representation of a protein structure as a graph where residue vertices (residue name used as a vertex label) are connected by geometrical proximity edges. The approach employs two steps. First, it uses a fast subgraph mining algorithm to find all occurrences of family-specific labeled subgraphs for all well characterized protein structural and functional families. Second, it queries a new structure for occurrences of a set of motifs characteristic of a known family, using a graph index to speed up Ullman’s subgraph isomorphism algorithm. The confidence of function inference from structure depends on the number of family-specific motifs found in the query structure compared with their distribution in a large non-redundant database of proteins. This method can assign a new structure to a specific functional family in cases where sequence alignments, sequence patterns, structural superposition and active site templates fail to provide accurate annotation.
20468001
Adaptive backstepping control of uncertain systems with unknown input time-delay
In this paper, we establish the robustness of adaptive controllers designed using the standard backstepping technique with respect to unmodeled dynamics involving unknown input time delay. While noting that some results on robust stabilization of non-minimum phase systems using the backstepping technique are available, we realize that the standard adaptive backstepping technique has only been shown applicable to unknown minimum phase systems. Another significance of our result is to enable the class of systems stablizable by adaptive backstepping controllers to cross the boundary of minimum phase systems, since systems with input time delay belong to non-minimum phase systems. Moreover, the L"2 and L"~ norms of the system output are also established as functions of design parameters. This implies that the transient system performance can be adjusted by choosing suitable design parameters.
2987996
Mining patterns in long sequential data with noise
Pattern discovery in time series data has been a problem of great importance in many fields, e.g., computational biology, performance analysis, consumer behavior, etc. Recently, considerable amount of research has been carried out in this area. The facts that the input data is typically very large and noises may present in various formats pose great challenge to the mining process. Recently, we have made several new research advances in this area. In this paper, we present some of them. We will survey new models proposed to address different types of noises as well as scalable algorithms developed for efficiently mining patterns under each model.
47178135
Efficient similarity joins for near duplicate detection
With the increasing amount of data and the need to integrate data from multiple data sources, a challenging issue is to find near duplicate records efficiently. In this paper, we focus on efficient algorithms to find pairs of records such that their similarities are above a given threshold. Several existing algorithms rely on the prefix filtering principle to avoid computing similarity values for all possible pairs of records. We propose new filtering techniques by exploiting the ordering information; they are integrated into the existing methods and drastically reduce the candidate sizes and hence improve the efficiency. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithms can achieve up to 2.6x - 5x speed-up over previous algorithms on several real datasets and provide alternative solutions to the near duplicate Web page detection problem.
11248403
Mining Shifting-and-Scaling Co-Regulation Patterns on Gene Expression Profiles
In this paper, we propose a new model for coherent clustering of gene expression data called reg-cluster. The proposed model allows (1) the expression profiles of genes in a cluster to follow any shifting-and-scaling patterns in subspace, where the scaling can be either positive or negative, and (2) the expression value changes across any two conditions of the cluster to be significant. No previous work measures up to the task that we have set: the density-based subspace clustering algorithms require genes to have similar expression levels to each other in subspace; the pattern-based biclustering algorithms only allow pure shifting or pure scaling patterns; and the tendency-based biclustering algorithms have no coherence guarantees. We also develop a novel patternbased biclustering algorithm for identifying shifting-andscaling co-regulation patterns, satisfying both coherence constraint and regulation constraint. Our experimental results show that the reg-cluster algorithm is able to detect a significant amount of clusters missed by previous models, and these clusters are potentially of high biological significance.