Carlotta Domeniconi

On-line LDA: Adaptive Topic Models for Mining Text Streams with Applications to Topic Detection and Tracking

This paper presents online topic model (OLDA), a topic model that automatically captures the thematic patterns and identifies emerging topics of text streams and their changes over time. Our approach allows the topic modeling framework, specifically the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model, to work in an online fashion such that it incrementally builds an up-to-date model (mixture of topics per document and mixture of words per topic) when a new document (or a set of documents) appears. A solution based on the empirical Bayes method is proposed. The idea is to incrementally update the current model according to the information inferred from the new stream of data with no need to access previous data. The dynamics of the proposed approach also provide an efficient mean to track the topics over time and detect the emerging topics in real time. Our method is evaluated both qualitatively and quantitatively using benchmark datasets. In our experiments, the OLDA has discovered interesting patterns by just analyzing a fraction of data at a time. Our tests also prove the ability of OLDA to align the topics across the epochs with which the evolution of the topics over time is captured. The OLDA is also comparable to, and sometimes better than, the original LDA in predicting the likelihood of unseen documents.

Locally adaptive metric nearest-neighbor classification

Nearest-neighbor classification assumes locally constant class conditional probabilities. This assumption becomes invalid in high dimensions with finite samples due to the curse of dimensionality. Severe bias can be introduced under these conditions when using the nearest-neighbor rule. We propose a locally adaptive nearest-neighbor classification method to try to minimize bias. We use a chi-squared distance analysis to compute a flexible metric for producing neighborhoods that are highly adaptive to query locations. Neighborhoods are elongated along less relevant feature dimensions and constricted along most influential ones. As a result, the class conditional probabilities are smoother in the modified neighborhoods, whereby better classification performance can be achieved. The efficacy of our method is validated and compared against other techniques using both simulated and real-world data.

Locally adaptive metrics for clustering high dimensional data

Clustering suffers from the curse of dimensionality, and similarity functions that use all input features with equal relevance may not be effective. We introduce an algorithm that discovers clusters in subspaces spanned by different combinations of dimensions via local weightings of features. This approach avoids the risk of loss of information encountered in global dimensionality reduction techniques, and does not assume any data distribution model. Our method associates to each cluster a weight vector, whose values capture the relevance of features within the corresponding cluster. We experimentally demonstrate the gain in perfomance our method achieves with respect to competitive methods, using both synthetic and real datasets. In particular, our results show the feasibility of the proposed technique to perform simultaneous clustering of genes and conditions in gene expression data, and clustering of very high-dimensional data such as text data.

Building semantic kernels for text classification using wikipedia

Document classification presents difficult challenges due to the sparsity and the high dimensionality of text data, and to the complex semantics of the natural language. The traditional document representation is a word-based vector (Bag of Words, or BOW), where each dimension is associated with a term of the dictionary containing all the words that appear in the corpus. Although simple and commonly used, this representation has several limitations. It is essential to embed semantic information and conceptual patterns in order to enhance the prediction capabilities of classification algorithms. In this paper, we overcome the shortages of the BOW approach by embedding background knowledge derived from Wikipedia into a semantic kernel, which is then used to enrich the representation of documents. Our empirical evaluation with real data sets demonstrates that our approach successfully achieves improved classification accuracy with respect to the BOW technique, and to other recently developed methods.

Approximating multi-dimensional aggregate range queries over real attributes

Finding approximate answers to multi-dimensional range queries over real valued attributes has significant applications in data exploration and database query optimization. In this paper we consider the following problem: given a table of d attributes whose domain is the real numbers, and a query that specifies a range in each dimension, find a good approximation of the number of records in the table that satisfy the query. We present a new histogram technique that is designed to approximate the density of multi-dimensional datasets with real attributes. Our technique finds buckets of variable size, and allows the buckets to overlap. Overlapping buckets allow more efficient approximation of the density. The size of the cells is based on the local density of the data. This technique leads to a faster and more compact approximation of the data distribution. We also show how to generalize kernel density estimators, and how to apply them on the multi-dimensional query approximation problem. Finally, we compare the accuracy of the proposed techniques with existing techniques using real and synthetic datasets.

Non-linear dimensionality reduction techniques for classification and visualization

In this paper we address the issue of using local embeddings for data visualization in two and three dimensions, and for classification. We advocate their use on the basis that they provide an efficient mapping procedure from the original dimension of the data, to a lower intrinsic dimension. We depict how they can accurately capture the users perception of similarity in high-dimensional data for visualization purposes. Moreover, we exploit the low-dimensional mapping provided by these embeddings, to develop new classification techniques, and we show experimentally that the classification accuracy is comparable (albeit using fewer dimensions) to a number of other classification procedures.

Weighted cluster ensembles: Methods and analysis

Cluster ensembles offer a solution to challenges inherent to clustering arising from its ill-posed nature. Cluster ensembles can provide robust and stable solutions by leveraging the consensus across multiple clustering results, while averaging out emergent spurious structures that arise due to the various biases to which each participating algorithm is tuned. In this article, we address the problem of combining multiple weighted clusters that belong to different subspaces of the input space. We leverage the diversity of the input clusterings in order to generate a consensus partition that is superior to the participating ones. Since we are dealing with weighted clusters, our consensus functions make use of the weight vectors associated with the clusters. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our techniques by running experiments with several real datasets, including high-dimensional text data. Furthermore, we investigate in depth the issue of diversity and accuracy for our ensemble methods. Our analysis and experimental results show that the proposed techniques are capable of producing a partition that is as good as or better than the best individual clustering.

Incremental support vector machine construction

SVMs (support vector machines) suffer from the problem of large memory requirement and CPU time when trained in batch mode on large data sets. We overcome these limitations, and at the same time make SVMs suitable for learning with data streams, by constructing incremental learning algorithms. We first introduce and compare different incremental learning techniques, and show that they are capable of producing performance results similar to the batch algorithm, and in some cases superior condensation properties. We then consider the problem of training SVMs using stream data. Our objective is to maintain an updated representation of recent batches of data. We apply incremental schemes to the problem and show that their accuracy is comparable to the batch algorithm.

Large margin nearest neighbor classifiers

The nearest neighbor technique is a simple and appealing approach to addressing classification problems. It relies on the assumption of locally constant class conditional probabilities. This assumption becomes invalid in high dimensions with a finite number of examples due to the curse of dimensionality. Severe bias can be introduced under these conditions when using the nearest neighbor rule. The employment of a locally adaptive metric becomes crucial in order to keep class conditional probabilities close to uniform, thereby minimizing the bias of estimates. We propose a technique that computes a locally flexible metric by means of support vector machines (SVMs). The decision function constructed by SVMs is used to determine the most discriminant direction in a neighborhood around the query. Such a direction provides a local feature weighting scheme. We formally show that our method increases the margin in the weighted space where classification takes place. Moreover, our method has the important advantage of online computational efficiency over competing locally adaptive techniques for nearest neighbor classification. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method using both real and simulated data.

Selectivity estimators for multidimensional range queries over real attributes

Abstract.Estimating the selectivity of multidimensional range queries over real valued attributes has significant applications in data exploration and database query optimization. In this paper, we consider the following problem: given a table of d attributes whose domain is the real numbers and a query that specifies a range in each dimension, find a good approximation of the number of records in the table that satisfy the query. The simplest approach to tackle this problem is to assume that the attributes are independent. More accurate estimators try to capture the joint data distribution of the attributes. In databases, such estimators include the construction of multidimensional histograms, random sampling, or the wavelet transform. In statistics, kernel estimation techniques are being used. Many traditional approaches assume that attribute values come from discrete, finite domains, where different values have high frequencies. However, for many novel applications (as in temporal, spatial, and multimedia databases) attribute values come from the infinite domain of real numbers. Consequently, each value appears very infrequently, a characteristic that affects the behavior and effectiveness of the estimator. Moreover, real-life data exhibit attribute correlations that also affect the estimator. We present a new histogram technique that is designed to approximate the density of multidimensional datasets with real attributes. Our technique defines buckets of variable size and allows the buckets to overlap. The size of the cells is based on the local density of the data. The use of overlapping buckets allows a more compact approximation of the data distribution. We also show how to generalize kernel density estimators and how to apply them to the multidimensional query approximation problem. Finally, we compare the accuracy of the proposed techniques with existing techniques using real and synthetic datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed techniques behave more accurately in high dimensionalities than previous approaches.