The increasing volume of data in modern business and science calls for more complex and sophisticated tools. Although advances in data mining technology have made extensive data collection much easier, it's still always evolving and there is a constant need for new techniques and tools that can help us transform this data into useful information and knowledge. Since the previous edition's publication, great advances have been made in the field of data mining. Not only does the third of edition of Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques continue the tradition of equipping you with an understanding and application of the theory and practice of discovering patterns hidden in large data sets, it also focuses on new, important topics in the field: data warehouses and data cube technology, mining stream, mining social networks, and mining spatial, multimedia and other complex data. Each chapter is a stand-alone guide to a critical topic, presenting proven algorithms and sound implementations ready to be used directly or with strategic modification against live data. This is the resource you need if you want to apply today's most powerful data mining techniques to meet real business challenges. * Presents dozens of algorithms and implementation examples, all in pseudo-code and suitable for use in real-world, large-scale data mining projects. * Addresses advanced topics such as mining object-relational databases, spatial databases, multimedia databases, time-series databases, text databases, the World Wide Web, and applications in several fields. *Provides a comprehensive, practical look at the concepts and techniques you need to get the most out of real business data

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Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating large data sets. Users specify a map function that processes a key/value pair to generate a set of intermediate key/value pairs, and a reduce function that merges all intermediate values associated with the same intermediate key. Many real world tasks are expressible in this model, as shown in the paper.

Programs written in this functional style are automatically parallelized and executed on a large cluster of commodity machines. The run-time system takes care of the details of partitioning the input data, scheduling the program's execution across a set of machines, handling machine failures, and managing the required inter-machine communication. This allows programmers without any experience with parallel and distributed systems to easily utilize the resources of a large distributed system.

Our implementation of MapReduce runs on a large cluster of commodity machines and is highly scalable: a typical MapReduce computation processes many terabytes of data on thousands of machines. Programmers find the system easy to use: hundreds of MapReduce programs have been implemented and upwards of one thousand MapReduce jobs are executed on Google's clusters every day.

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MapReduce: simplified data processing on large clusters

MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating large datasets that is amenable to a broad variety of real-world tasks. Users specify the computation in terms of a map and a reduce function, and the underlying runtime system automatically parallelizes the computation across large-scale clusters of machines, handles machine failures, and schedules inter-machine communication to make efficient use of the network and disks. Programmers find the system easy to use: more than ten thousand distinct MapReduce programs have been implemented internally at Google over the past four years, and an average of one hundred thousand MapReduce jobs are executed on Google's clusters every day, processing a total of more than twenty petabytes of data per day.

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Many problems of recent interest in statistics and machine learning can be posed in the framework of convex optimization. Due to the explosion in size and complexity of modern datasets, it is increasingly important to be able to solve problems with a very large number of features or training examples. As a result, both the decentralized collection or storage of these datasets as well as accompanying distributed solution methods are either necessary or at least highly desirable. In this review, we argue that the alternating direction method of multipliers is well suited to distributed convex optimization, and in particular to large-scale problems arising in statistics, machine learning, and related areas. The method was developed in the 1970s, with roots in the 1950s, and is equivalent or closely related to many other algorithms, such as dual decomposition, the method of multipliers, Douglas–Rachford splitting, Spingarn's method of partial inverses, Dykstra's alternating projections, Bregman iterative algorithms for l1 problems, proximal methods, and others. After briefly surveying the theory and history of the algorithm, we discuss applications to a wide variety of statistical and machine learning problems of recent interest, including the lasso, sparse logistic regression, basis pursuit, covariance selection, support vector machines, and many others. We also discuss general distributed optimization, extensions to the nonconvex setting, and efficient implementation, including some details on distributed MPI and Hadoop MapReduce implementations.

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Distributed Optimization and Statistical Learning Via the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers

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

Many of the data sources used in stream query processing are known to exhibit bursty behavior. We focus here on passive network monitoring, an application in which the data rates typically exhibit a large peak-to-average ratio. Provisioning a stream query processor to handle peak rates in such a setting can be prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we propose to solve this problem by provisioning the query processor for typical data rates instead of much higher peak data rates. To enable this strategy, we present mechanisms and policies for managing the tradeoffs between the latency and accuracy of query results when bursts exceed the steady-state capacity of the query processor. We describe the current status of our implementation and present experimental results on a testbed network monitoring application to demonstrate the utility of our approach.

Declarative Network Monitoring with an Underprovisioned Query Processor (Extended Version)

In the context of interactive query sessions, it is common to issue a succession of queries, transforming a dataset to the desired result. It is often difficult to comprehend a succession of transformations, especially for complex queries. Thus, to facilitate understanding of each data transformation and to provide continuous feedback, we introduce the concept of "data tweening", i.e., interpolating between resultsets, presenting to the user a series of incremental visual representations of a resultset transformation. We present tweening methods that consider not just the changes in the result, but also the changes in the query. Through user studies, we show that data tweening allows users to efficiently comprehend data transforms, and also enables them to gain a better understanding of the underlying query operations.

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Data tweening: incremental visualization of data transforms

Serverless computing has grown in popularity in recent years, with an increasing number of applications being built on Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) platforms. By default, FaaS platforms support retry-based fault tolerance, but this is insufficient for programs that modify shared state, as they can unwittingly persist partial sets of updates in case of failures. To address this challenge, we would like atomic visibility of the updates made by a FaaS application. 
In this paper, we present AFT, an atomic fault tolerance shim for serverless applications. AFT interposes between a commodity FaaS platform and storage engine and ensures atomic visibility of updates by enforcing the read atomic isolation guarantee. AFT supports new protocols to guarantee read atomic isolation in the serverless setting. We demonstrate that aft introduces minimal overhead relative to existing storage engines and scales smoothly to thousands of requests per second, while preventing a significant number of consistency anomalies.

A Fault-Tolerance Shim for Serverless Computing

In this dissertation, we present the design and implementation of declarative networks. Declarative networking proposes the use of a declarative query language for specifying and implementing network protocols, and employs a dataflow framework at runtime for com munication and maintenance of network state. The primary goal of declarative networking is to greatly simplify the process of specifying, implementing, deploying and evolving a network design. In addition, declarative networking serves as an important step towards an extensible, evolvable network architecture that can support flexible, secure and efficient deployment of new network protocols. 
Our main contributions are as follows. First, we formally define the Network Datalog (NDlog) language based on extensions to the Datalog recursive query language, and propose NDlog as a Domain Specific Language for programming network protocols. We demonstrate that NDlog can be used to express a large variety of network protocols in a handful of lines of program code, resulting in orders of magnitude reduction in code size. For example, the Chord overlay network can be specified in 48 NDlog rules. In addition, the core of the language (Datalog) has polynomial complexity, and our NDlog extensions can be statically analyzed for termination using standard analysis techniques. 
Second, to validate the design of NDlog, we present our implementation of P2, which is a full-fledged declarative networking system that compiles NDlog and executes it via a dataflow engine inspired by the Click modular router. We experimentally evaluate the P2 system on hundreds of distributed machines. The P2 system is publicly available for download and has been used in research projects at a number of institutions. 
Third, based on our experiences implementing declarative networks, we explore a wide variety of database research issues that are important for the practical realization of declarative networks. These include pipelined execution of distributed recursive queries, reason ing about query semantics based on the well-known distributed systems notion of "eventual consistency", incorporating the notion of soft-state into the logical framework of NDlog, and the use of query optimizations to improve the performance of network protocols.

https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~boonloo/papers/dn-thesis.pdf

The design and implementation of declarative networks

Many solid modeling applications require information not only about the geometry of an object but also about its topology Most interchange formats do not provide this information, which the application must then derive as it builds its own topological data structure from unordered, “polygon soup” input For very large data sets, the topological data structure itself can be bigger than core memory, so that a naive algorithm for building it that doesn't take virtual memory access patterns into account can become prohibitively slow due to thrashing In this paper, we describe a new out-of-core algorithm that can build a topological data structure efficiently from very large data sets, improving performance by two orders of magnitude over a naive approach

Joseph M. Hellerstein

Papers

Declarative Network Monitoring with an Underprovisioned Query Processor (Extended Version)

Data tweening: incremental visualization of data transforms

A Fault-Tolerance Shim for Serverless Computing

The design and implementation of declarative networks

Out-of-core build of a topological data structure from polygon soup