More than twelve years have elapsed since the first public release of WEKA. In that time, the software has been rewritten entirely from scratch, evolved substantially and now accompanies a text on data mining [35]. These days, WEKA enjoys widespread acceptance in both academia and business, has an active community, and has been downloaded more than 1.4 million times since being placed on Source-Forge in April 2000. This paper provides an introduction to the WEKA workbench, reviews the history of the project, and, in light of the recent 3.6 stable release, briefly discusses what has been added since the last stable version (Weka 3.4) released in 2003.

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The WEKA data mining software: an update

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 automated categorization (or classification) of texts into predefined categories has witnessed a booming interest in the last 10 years, due to the increased availability of documents in digital form and the ensuing need to organize them. In the research community the dominant approach to this problem is based on machine learning techniques: a general inductive process automatically builds a classifier by learning, from a set of preclassified documents, the characteristics of the categories. The advantages of this approach over the knowledge engineering approach (consisting in the manual definition of a classifier by domain experts) are a very good effectiveness, considerable savings in terms of expert labor power, and straightforward portability to different domains. This survey discusses the main approaches to text categorization that fall within the machine learning paradigm. We will discuss in detail issues pertaining to three different problems, namely, document representation, classifier construction, and classifier evaluation.

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Machine learning in automated text categorization

Concept drift primarily refers to an online supervised learning scenario when the relation between the input data and the target variable changes over time. Assuming a general knowledge of supervised learning in this article, we characterize adaptive learning processes; categorize existing strategies for handling concept drift; overview the most representative, distinct, and popular techniques and algorithms; discuss evaluation methodology of adaptive algorithms; and present a set of illustrative applications. The survey covers the different facets of concept drift in an integrated way to reflect on the existing scattered state of the art. Thus, it aims at providing a comprehensive introduction to the concept drift adaptation for researchers, industry analysts, and practitioners.

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A survey on concept drift adaptation

Building a successful recommender system depends on understanding both the dimensions of people's preferences as well as their dynamics. In certain domains, such as fashion, modeling such preferences can be incredibly difficult, due to the need to simultaneously model the visual appearance of products as well as their evolution over time. The subtle semantics and non-linear dynamics of fashion evolution raise unique challenges especially considering the sparsity and large scale of the underlying datasets. In this paper we build novel models for the One-Class Collaborative Filtering setting, where our goal is to estimate users' fashion-aware personalized ranking functions based on their past feedback. To uncover the complex and evolving visual factors that people consider when evaluating products, our method combines high-level visual features extracted from a deep convolutional neural network, users' past feedback, as well as evolving trends within the community. Experimentally we evaluate our method on two large real-world datasets from Amazon.com, where we show it to outperform state-of-the-art personalized ranking measures, and also use it to visualize the high-level fashion trends across the 11-year span of our dataset.

Ups and Downs: Modeling the Visual Evolution of Fashion Trends with One-Class Collaborative Filtering

KDD is a complex and demanding task While a large number of methods has been established for numerous problems, many challenges remain to be solved New tasks emerge requiring the development of new methods or processing schemes Like in software development, the development of such solutions demands for careful analysis, specification, implementation, and testing Rapid prototyping is an approach which allows crucial design decisions as early as possible A rapid prototyping system should support maximal re-use and innovative combinations of existing methods, as well as simple and quick integration of new onesThis paper describes Yale, a free open-source environment forKDD and machine learning Yale provides a rich variety of methods whichallows rapid prototyping for new applications and makes costlyre-implementations unnecessary Additionally, Yale offers extensive functionality for process evaluation and optimization which is a crucial property for any KDD rapid prototyping tool Following the paradigm of visual programming eases the design of processing schemes While the graphical user interface supports interactive design, the underlying XML representation enables automated applications after the prototyping phaseAfter a discussion of the key concepts of Yale, we illustrate the advantages of rapid prototyping for KDD on case studies ranging from data pre-processing to result visualization These case studies cover tasks like feature engineering, text mining, data stream mining and tracking drifting concepts, ensemble methods and distributed data mining This variety of applications is also reflected in a broad user base, we counted more than 40,000 downloads during the last twelve months

YALE: rapid prototyping for complex data mining tasks

For many learning tasks where data is collected over an extended period of time, its underlying distribution is likely to change. A typical example is information ltering, i.e. the adaptive classiication of documents with respect to a particular user interest. Both the interest of the user and the document content change over time. A ltering system should be able to adapt to such concept changes. This paper proposes a new method to recognize and handle concept changes with support vector machines. The method maintains a window on the training data. The key idea is to automatically adjust the window size so that the estimated generalization error is minimized. The new approach is both theoretically well-founded as well as eeective and eecient in practice. Since it does not require complicated parameterization, it is simpler to use and more robust than comparable heuristics. Experiments with simulated concept drift scenarios based on real-world text data compare the new method with other window management approaches. We show that it can eeectively select an appropriate window size in a robust way.

Detecting Concept Drift with Support Vector Machines

For many learning tasks where data is collected over an extended period of time, its underlying distribution is likely to change. A typical example is information filtering, i.e. the adaptive classification of documents with respect to a particular user interest. Both the interest of the user and the document content change over time. A filtering system should be able to adapt to such concept changes. This paper proposes several methods to handle such concept drifts with support vector machines. The methods either maintain an adaptive time window on the training data [13], select representative training examples, or weight the training examples [15]. The key idea is to automatically adjust the window size, the example selection, and the example weighting, respectively, so that the estimated generalization error is minimized. The approaches are both theoretically well-founded as well as effective and efficient in practice. Since they do not require complicated parameterization, they are simpler to use and more robust than comparable heuristics.

Experiments with simulated concept drift scenarios based on real-world text data compare the new methods with other window management approaches. We show that they can effectively select an appropriate window size, example selection, and example weighting, respectively, in a robust way. We also explain how the proposed example selection and weighting approaches can be turned into incremental approaches. Since most evaluation methods for machine learning, like e.g. cross-validation, assume that the examples are independent and identically distributed, which is clearly unrealistic in the case of concept drift, alternative evaluation schemes are used to estimate and optimize the performance of each learning step within the concept drift handling frameworks as well as to evaluate and compare the different frameworks.

Learning drifting concepts: Example selection vs. example weighting

Powerful, Flexible Tools for a Data-Driven WorldAs the data deluge continues in todays world, the need to master data mining, predictive analytics, and business analytics has never been greater. These techniques and tools provide unprecedented insights into data, enabling better decision making and forecasting, and ultimately the solution of increasingly complex problems. Learn from the Creators of the RapidMiner Software Written by leaders in the data mining community, including the developers of the RapidMiner software, RapidMiner: Data Mining Use Cases and Business Analytics Applications provides an in-depth introduction to the application of data mining and business analytics techniques and tools in scientific research, medicine, industry, commerce, and diverse other sectors. It presents the most powerful and flexible open source software solutions: RapidMiner and RapidAnalytics. The software and their extensions can be freely downloaded at www.RapidMiner.com. Understand Each Stage of the Data Mining ProcessThe book and software tools cover all relevant steps of the data mining process, from data loading, transformation, integration, aggregation, and visualization to automated feature selection, automated parameter and process optimization, and integration with other tools, such as R packages or your IT infrastructure via web services. The book and software also extensively discuss the analysis of unstructured data, including text and image mining. Easily Implement Analytics Approaches Using RapidMiner and RapidAnalytics Each chapter describes an application, how to approach it with data mining methods, and how to implement it with RapidMiner and RapidAnalytics. These application-oriented chapters give you not only the necessary analytics to solve problems and tasks, but also reproducible, step-by-step descriptions of using RapidMiner and RapidAnalytics. The case studies serve as blueprints for your own data mining applications, enabling you to effectively solve similar problems.

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RapidMiner: Data Mining Use Cases and Business Analytics Applications

The task of information filtering is to classify texts from a stream of documents into relevant and nonrelevant, respectively, with respect to a particular category or user interest, which may change over time. A filtering system should be able to adapt to such concept changes. This paper explores methods to recognize concept changes and to maintain windows on the training data, whose size is either fixed or automatically adapted to the current extent of concept change. Experiments with two simulated concept drift scenarios based on real-world text data and eight learning methods are performed to evaluate three indicators for concept changes and to compare approaches with fixed and adjustable window sizes, respectively, to each other and to learning on all previously seen examples. Even using only a simple window on the data already improves the performance of the classifiers significantly as compared to learning on all examples. For most of the classifiers, the window adjustments lead to a further increase in performance compared to windows of fixed size. The chosen indicators allow to reliably recognize concept changes.

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Ralf Klinkenberg

Papers

YALE: rapid prototyping for complex data mining tasks

Detecting Concept Drift with Support Vector Machines

Learning drifting concepts: Example selection vs. example weighting

RapidMiner: Data Mining Use Cases and Business Analytics Applications

Adaptive Information Filtering: Learning in the Presence of Concept Drifts