Tree boosting is a highly effective and widely used machine learning method. In this paper, we describe a scalable end-to-end tree boosting system called XGBoost, which is used widely by data scientists to achieve state-of-the-art results on many machine learning challenges. We propose a novel sparsity-aware algorithm for sparse data and weighted quantile sketch for approximate tree learning. More importantly, we provide insights on cache access patterns, data compression and sharding to build a scalable tree boosting system. By combining these insights, XGBoost scales beyond billions of examples using far fewer resources than existing systems.

/pdf/xgboost-a-scalable-tree-boosting-system-48ocu6x4c7.pdf

XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System

Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Machine learning

Probability Distributions.- Linear Models for Regression.- Linear Models for Classification.- Neural Networks.- Kernel Methods.- Sparse Kernel Machines.- Graphical Models.- Mixture Models and EM.- Approximate Inference.- Sampling Methods.- Continuous Latent Variables.- Sequential Data.- Combining Models.

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

Apache Spark is a popular open-source platform for large-scale data processing that is well-suited for iterative machine learning tasks. In this paper we present MLlib, Spark's open-source distributed machine learning library. MLLIB provides efficient functionality for a wide range of learning settings and includes several underlying statistical, optimization, and linear algebra primitives. Shipped with Spark, MLLIB supports several languages and provides a high-level API that leverages Spark's rich ecosystem to simplify the development of end-to-end machine learning pipelines. MLLIB has experienced a rapid growth due to its vibrant open-source community of over 140 contributors, and includes extensive documentation to support further growth and to let users quickly get up to speed.

/pdf/mllib-machine-learning-in-apache-spark-27ddi10m3m.pdf

MLlib: machine learning in apache spark

Deep learning is currently an extremely active research area in machine learning and pattern recognition society. It has gained huge successes in a broad area of applications such as speech recognition, computer vision, and natural language processing. With the sheer size of data available today, big data brings big opportunities and transformative potential for various sectors; on the other hand, it also presents unprecedented challenges to harnessing data and information. As the data keeps getting bigger, deep learning is coming to play a key role in providing big data predictive analytics solutions. In this paper, we provide a brief overview of deep learning, and highlight current research efforts and the challenges to big data, as well as the future trends.

http://romisatriawahono.net/lecture/rm/survey/machine%20learning/Chen%20-%20Big%20Data%20Deep%20Learning%20-%202014.pdf

Big Data Deep Learning: Challenges and Perspectives

We describe the design and implementation of the Cornell Cayuga System for scalable event processing. We present a query language based on Cayuga Algebra for naturally expressing complex event patterns. We also describe several novel system design and implementation issues, focusing on Cayuga’s query processor, its indexing approach, how Cayuga handles simultaneous events, and its specialized garbage collector.

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/%7Ewmwhite/papers/2007-CIDR-Cayuga.pdf

Cayuga: A General Purpose Event Monitoring System.

Classification and regression tree learning on massive datasets is a common data mining task at Google, yet many state of the art tree learning algorithms require training data to reside in memory on a single machine. While more scalable implementations of tree learning have been proposed, they typically require specialized parallel computing architectures. In contrast, the majority of Google's computing infrastructure is based on commodity hardware.In this paper, we describe PLANET: a scalable distributed framework for learning tree models over large datasets. PLANET defines tree learning as a series of distributed computations, and implements each one using the MapReduce model of distributed computation. We show how this framework supports scalable construction of classification and regression trees, as well as ensembles of such models. We discuss the benefits and challenges of using a MapReduce compute cluster for tree learning, and demonstrate the scalability of this approach by applying it to a real world learning task from the domain of computational advertising.

/pdf/planet-massively-parallel-learning-of-tree-ensembles-with-2ja7h7lopk.pdf

PLANET: massively parallel learning of tree ensembles with MapReduce

We propose a demonstration of Cayuga, a complex event monitoring system for high speed data streams. Our demonstration will show Cayuga applied to monitoring Web feeds; the demo will illustrate the expressiveness of the Cayuga query language, the scalability of its query processing engine to high stream rates, and a visualization of the internals of the query processing engine.

/pdf/cayuga-a-high-performance-event-processing-engine-4hyvc5e6n6.pdf

Cayuga: a high-performance event processing engine

Identifying the extremal (minimal and maximal) sets from a collection of sets is an important subproblem in the areas of data-mining and satisfiability checking. For example, extremal set finding algorithms are used in the context of mining maximal frequent itemsets, and for simplifying large propositional satisfiability instances derived from real world tasks such as circuit routing and verification. In this paper, we describe two new algorithms for the task and detail their performance on real and synthetic data. Each algorithm leverages an entirely different principle – one primarily exploits set cardinality constraints, the other lexicographic constraints. Despite the inherent difficulty of this problem (the best known worst-case bounds are nearly quadratic), we show that both these algorithms provide excellent performance in practice, and can identify all extremal sets from multi-gigabyte itemset data using only a single processor core. Both algorithms are concise and can be implemented in no more than a few hundred lines of code. Our reference C++ implementations are open source and available for download.

/pdf/fast-algorithms-for-finding-extremal-sets-26ioxq5nby.pdf

Biswanath Panda

Papers

Cayuga: A General Purpose Event Monitoring System.

PLANET: massively parallel learning of tree ensembles with MapReduce

Cayuga: a high-performance event processing engine

Fast Algorithms for Finding Extremal Sets

MapReduce and Its Application to Massively Parallel Learning of Decision Tree Ensembles