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

The database research community is rightly proud of success in basic research, and its remarkable record of technology transfer. Now the field needs to radically broaden its research focus to attack the issues of capturing, storing, analyzing, and presenting the vast array of online data. The database research community should embrace a broader research agenda -- broadening the definition of database management to embrace all the content of the Web and other online data stores, and rethinking our fundamental assumptions in light of technology shifts. To accelerate this transition, we recommend changing the way research results are evaluated and presented. In particular, we advocate encouraging more speculative and long-range work, moving conferences to a poster format, and publishing all research literature on the Web.

The Asilomar Report on Database Research

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The Architecture of PIER: an Internet-Scale Query Processor

As query engines are scaled and federated, they must cope with highly unpredictable and changeable environments. In the Telegraph project, we are attempting to architect and implement a continuously adaptive query engine suitable for global-area systems, massive parallelism, and sensor networks. To set the stage for our research, we present a survey of prior work on adaptive query processing, focusing on three characterizations of adaptivity: the frequency of adaptivity, the effects of adaptivity, and the extent of adaptivity. Given this survey, we sketch directions for research in the Telegraph project.

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Adaptive Query Processing: Technology in Evolution.

Static analysis methods are given for determining whether arbitrary sets of database production rules are (1) guaranteed to terminate; (2) guaranteed to produce a unique final database state; (3) guaranteed to produce a unique stream of observable actions. When the analysis determines that one of these properties is not guaranteed, it isolates the rules responsible for the problem and determines criteria that, if satisfied, guarantee the property. The analysis methods are presented in the context of the Starburst Rule System; they will form the basis of an interactive development environment for Starburst rule programmers.

Behavior of database production rules: termination, confluence, and observable determinism

We present a technique that masks failures in a cluster to provide high availability and fault-tolerance for long-running, parallelized dataflows. We can use these dataflows to implement a variety of continuous query (CQ) applications that require high-throughput, 24x7 operation. Examples include network monitoring, phone call processing, click-stream processing, and online financial analysis. Our main contribution is a scheme that carefully integrates traditional query processing techniques for partitioned parallelism with the process-pairs approach for high availability. This delicate integration allows us to tolerate failures of portions of a parallel dataflow without sacrificing result quality. Upon failure, our technique provides quick fail-over, and automatically recovers the lost pieces on the fly. This piecemeal recovery provides minimal disruption to the ongoing dataflow computation and improved reliability as compared to the straight-forward application of the process-pairs technique on a per dataflow basis. Thus, our technique provides the high availability necessary for critical CQ applications. Our techniques are encapsulated in a reusable dataflow operator called Flux, an extension of the Exchange that is used to compose parallel dataflows. Encapsulating the fault-tolerance logic into Flux minimizes modifications to existing operator code and relieves the burden on the operator writer of repeatedly implementing and verifying this critical logic. We present experiments illustrating these features with an implementation of Flux in the TelegraphCQ code base [8].

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Joseph M. Hellerstein

Papers

The Asilomar Report on Database Research

The Architecture of PIER: an Internet-Scale Query Processor

Adaptive Query Processing: Technology in Evolution.

Behavior of database production rules: termination, confluence, and observable determinism

Highly available, fault-tolerant, parallel dataflows