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

We will review some of the major results in random graphs and some of the more challenging open problems. We will cover algorithmic and structural questions. We will touch on newer models, including those related to the WWW.

Random graphs

Many practical computing problems concern large graphs. Standard examples include the Web graph and various social networks. The scale of these graphs - in some cases billions of vertices, trillions of edges - poses challenges to their efficient processing. In this paper we present a computational model suitable for this task. Programs are expressed as a sequence of iterations, in each of which a vertex can receive messages sent in the previous iteration, send messages to other vertices, and modify its own state and that of its outgoing edges or mutate graph topology. This vertex-centric approach is flexible enough to express a broad set of algorithms. The model has been designed for efficient, scalable and fault-tolerant implementation on clusters of thousands of commodity computers, and its implied synchronicity makes reasoning about programs easier. Distribution-related details are hidden behind an abstract API. The result is a framework for processing large graphs that is expressive and easy to program.

/pdf/pregel-a-system-for-large-scale-graph-processing-30lgjenxxg.pdf

Pregel: a system for large-scale graph processing

where A represents the magnetic vector potential, is an integral of the hydromagnetic equations. This -integral made it possible to formulate a variational principle for the force-free magnetic fields. The integral expresses the fact that motions cannot transform a given field in an entirely arbitrary different field, if the conductivity of the medium isconsidered infinite. In this paper we shall show that the full set of hydromagnetic equations admit five more integrals, besides the energy integral, if dissipative processes are absent. These integrals, as we shall presently verify, are I2 =fbHvdV, (2)

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Computational geometry

The quest for a linear-time single-source shortest-path (SSSP) algorithm on directed graphs with positive edge weights is an ongoing hot research topic. While Thorup recently found an O(n + m) time RAM algorithm for undirected graphs with n nodes, m edges and integer edge weights in {0,…,2w - 1} where w denotes the word length, the currently best time bound for directed sparse graphs on a RAM is O(n + m · log log n).In the present paper we study the average-case complexity of SSSP. We give a simple algorithm for arbitrary directed graphs with random edge weights uniformly distributed in [0, 1] and show that it needs linear time O(n + m) with high probability.

Single-source shortest-paths on arbitrary directed graphs in linear average-case time

Memory Hierarchies - Models and Lower Bounds.- Basic External Memory Data Structures.- A Survey of Techniques for Designing I/O-Efficient Algorithms.- Elementary Graph Algorithms in External Memory.- I/O-Efficient Algorithms for Sparse Graphs.- External Memory Computational Geometry Revisited.- Full-Text Indexes in External Memory.- Algorithms for Hardware Caches and TLB.- Cache Oblivious Algorithms.- An Overview of Cache Optimization Techniques and Cache-Aware Numerical Algorithms.- Memory Limitations in Artificial Intelligence.- Algorithmic Approaches for Storage Networks.- An Overview of File System Architectures.- Exploitation of the Memory Hierarchy in Relational DBMSs.- Hierarchical Models and Software Tools for Parallel Programming.- Case Study: Memory Conscious Parallel Sorting.

Algorithms for memory hierarchies: advanced lectures

Algorithms - ESA 2010

Breadth First Search (BFS) traversal is an archetype for many important graph problems. However, computing a BFS level decomposition for massive graphs was considered nonviable so far, because of the large number of I/Os it incurs. This paper presents the first experimental evaluation of recent external-memory BFS algorithms for general graphs. With our STXXL based implementations exploiting pipelining and disk-parallelism, we were able to compute the BFS level decomposition of a web-crawl based graph of around 130 million nodes and 1.4 billion edges in less than 4 hours using single disk and 2.3 hours using 4 disks. We demonstrate that some rather simple external-memory algorithms perform significantly better (minutes as compared to hours) than internal-memory BFS, even if more than half of the input resides internally.

/pdf/a-computational-study-of-external-memory-bfs-algorithms-2qx8xnx3k6.pdf

A computational study of external-memory BFS algorithms

In spite of intensive research, little progress has been made towards fast and work-efficient parallel algorithms for the single source shortest path problem. Our Δ-stepping algorithm, a generalization of Dial's algorithm and the Bellman-Ford algorithm, improves this situation at least in the following "average-case" sense: For random directed graphs with edge probability d/n and uniformly distributed edge weights a PRAM version works in expected time O(log3 n/ log log n) using linear work. The algorithm also allows for efficient adaptation to distributed memory machines. Implementations show that our approach works on real machines. As a side effect, we get a simple linear time sequential algorithm for a large class of not necessarily random directed graphs with random edge weights.

Ulrich Meyer

Papers

Single-source shortest-paths on arbitrary directed graphs in linear average-case time

Algorithms for memory hierarchies: advanced lectures

Algorithms - ESA 2010

A computational study of external-memory BFS algorithms

$\Delta$-Stepping: A Parallel Single Source Shortest Path Algorithm