Sunita Sarawagi

Bio: Sunita Sarawagi is an academic researcher from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. The author has contributed to research in topics: Information extraction & Query optimization. The author has an hindex of 50, co-authored 144 publications receiving 11716 citations. Previous affiliations of Sunita Sarawagi include Google & Microsoft.

Interactive deduplication using active learning

Abstract: Deduplication is a key operation in integrating data from multiple sources. The main challenge in this task is designing a function that can resolve when a pair of records refer to the same entity in spite of various data inconsistencies. Most existing systems use hand-coded functions. One way to overcome the tedium of hand-coding is to train a classifier to distinguish between duplicates and non-duplicates. The success of this method critically hinges on being able to provide a covering and challenging set of training pairs that bring out the subtlety of deduplication function. This is non-trivial because it requires manually searching for various data inconsistencies between any two records spread apart in large lists.We present our design of a learning-based deduplication system that uses a novel method of interactively discovering challenging training pairs using active learning. Our experiments on real-life datasets show that active learning significantly reduces the number of instances needed to achieve high accuracy. We investigate various design issues that arise in building a system to provide interactive response, fast convergence, and interpretable output.

Discriminative Methods for Multi-labeled Classification

Abstract: In this paper we present methods of enhancing existing discriminative classifiers for multi-labeled predictions. Discriminative methods like support vector machines perform very well for uni-labeled text classification tasks. Multi-labeled classification is a harder task subject to relatively less attention. In the multi-labeled setting, classes are often related to each other or part of a is-a hierarchy. We present a new technique for combining text features and features indicating relationships between classes, which can be used with any discriminative algorithm. We also present two enhancements to the margin of SVMs for building better models in the presence of overlapping classes. We present results of experiments on real world text benchmark datasets. Our new methods beat accuracy of existing methods with statistically significant improvements.

Semi-Markov Conditional Random Fields for Information Extraction

Abstract: We describe semi-Markov conditional random fields (semi-CRFs), a conditionally trained version of semi-Markov chains. Intuitively, a semi-CRF on an input sequence x outputs a "segmentation" of x, in which labels are assigned to segments (i.e., subsequences) of x rather than to individual elements xi of x. Importantly, features for semi-CRFs can measure properties of segments, and transitions within a segment can be non-Markovian. In spite of this additional power, exact learning and inference algorithms for semi-CRFs are polynomial-time—often only a small constant factor slower than conventional CRFs. In experiments on five named entity recognition problems, semi-CRFs generally outperform conventional CRFs.

Information Extraction

Abstract: The automatic extraction of information from unstructured sources has opened up new avenues for querying, organizing, and analyzing data by drawing upon the clean semantics of structured databases and the abundance of unstructured data. The field of information extraction has its genesis in the natural language processing community where the primary impetus came from competitions centered around the recognition of named entities like people names and organization from news articles. As society became more data oriented with easy online access to both structured and unstructured data, new applications of structure extraction came around. Now, there is interest in converting our personal desktops to structured databases, the knowledge in scientific publications to structured records, and harnessing the Internet for structured fact finding queries. Consequently, there are many different communities of researchers bringing in techniques from machine learning, databases, information retrieval, and computational linguistics for various aspects of the information extraction problem. This review is a survey of information extraction research of over two decades from these diverse communities. We create a taxonomy of the field along various dimensions derived from the nature of the extraction task, the techniques used for extraction, the variety of input resources exploited, and the type of output produced. We elaborate on rule-based and statistical methods for entity and relationship extraction. In each case we highlight the different kinds of models for capturing the diversity of clues driving the recognition process and the algorithms for training and efficiently deploying the models. We survey techniques for optimizing the various steps in an information extraction pipeline, adapting to dynamic data, integrating with existing entities and handling uncertainty in the extraction process.

On the Computation of Multidimensional Aggregates

Abstract: At the heart of all OLAP or multidimensional data analysis applications is the ability to simultaneously aggregate across many sets of dimensions. Computing multidimensional aggregates is a performance bottleneck for these applications. This paper presents fast algorithms for computing a collection of group bys. We focus on a special case of the aggregation problem - computation of the CUBE operator. The CUBE operator requires computing group-bys on all possible combinations of a list of attributes, and is equivalent to the union of a number of standard group-by operations. We show how the structure of CUBE computation can be viewed in terms of a hierarchy of group-by operations. Our algorithms extend sort-based and hashbased grouping methods with several .optimizations, like combining common operations across multiple groupbys, caching, and using pre-computed group-by8 for computing other groupbys. Empirical evaluation shows that the resulting algorithms give much better performance compared to straightforward meth

Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques

Abstract: 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

Machine learning

Abstract: 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.).

Anomaly detection: A survey

Abstract: Anomaly detection is an important problem that has been researched within diverse research areas and application domains. Many anomaly detection techniques have been specifically developed for certain application domains, while others are more generic. This survey tries to provide a structured and comprehensive overview of the research on anomaly detection. We have grouped existing techniques into different categories based on the underlying approach adopted by each technique. For each category we have identified key assumptions, which are used by the techniques to differentiate between normal and anomalous behavior. When applying a given technique to a particular domain, these assumptions can be used as guidelines to assess the effectiveness of the technique in that domain. For each category, we provide a basic anomaly detection technique, and then show how the different existing techniques in that category are variants of the basic technique. This template provides an easier and more succinct understanding of the techniques belonging to each category. Further, for each category, we identify the advantages and disadvantages of the techniques in that category. We also provide a discussion on the computational complexity of the techniques since it is an important issue in real application domains. We hope that this survey will provide a better understanding of the different directions in which research has been done on this topic, and how techniques developed in one area can be applied in domains for which they were not intended to begin with.

Mining frequent patterns without candidate generation

Abstract: Mining frequent patterns in transaction databases, time-series databases, and many other kinds of databases has been studied popularly in data mining research. Most of the previous studies adopt an Apriori-like candidate set generation-and-test approach. However, candidate set generation is still costly, especially when there exist prolific patterns and/or long patterns.In this study, we propose a novel frequent pattern tree (FP-tree) structure, which is an extended prefix-tree structure for storing compressed, crucial information about frequent patterns, and develop an efficient FP-tree-based mining method, FP-growth, for mining the complete set of frequent patterns by pattern fragment growth. Efficiency of mining is achieved with three techniques: (1) a large database is compressed into a highly condensed, much smaller data structure, which avoids costly, repeated database scans, (2) our FP-tree-based mining adopts a pattern fragment growth method to avoid the costly generation of a large number of candidate sets, and (3) a partitioning-based, divide-and-conquer method is used to decompose the mining task into a set of smaller tasks for mining confined patterns in conditional databases, which dramatically reduces the search space. Our performance study shows that the FP-growth method is efficient and scalable for mining both long and short frequent patterns, and is about an order of magnitude faster than the Apriori algorithm and also faster than some recently reported new frequent pattern mining methods.