In this paper, we propose a novel formulation for distance-based
outliers
that is based on the distance of a point from its
k
th
nearest neighbor. We rank each point on the basis of its distance to its
k
th
nearest neighbor and declare the top
n
points in this ranking to be outliers. In addition to developing relatively straightforward solutions to finding such outliers based on the classical nested-loop join and index join algorithms, we develop a highly efficient
partition-based
algorithm for mining outliers. This algorithm first partitions the input data set into disjoint subsets, and then prunes entire partitions as soon as it is determined that they cannot contain outliers. This results in substantial savings in computation. We present the results of an extensive experimental study on real-life and synthetic data sets. The results from a real-life NBA database highlight and reveal several expected and unexpected aspects of the database. The results from a study on synthetic data sets demonstrate that the partition-based algorithm scales well with respect to both data set size and data set dimensionality.
Data integrated from multiple sources may contain inconsistencies that violate integrity constraints. The constraint repair problem attempts to find "low cost" changes that, when applied, will cause the constraints to be satisfied. While in most previous work repair cost is stated in terms of tuple insertions and deletions, we follow recent work to define a database repair as a set of value modifications. In this context, we introduce a novel cost framework that allows for the application of techniques from record-linkage to the search for good repairs. We prove that finding minimal-cost repairs in this model is NP-complete in the size of the database, and introduce an approach to heuristic repair-construction based on equivalence classes of attribute values. Following this approach, we define two greedy algorithms. While these simple algorithms take time cubic in the size of the database, we develop optimizations inspired by algorithms for duplicate-record detection that greatly improve scalability. We evaluate our framework and algorithms on synthetic and real data, and show that our proposed optimizations greatly improve performance at little or no cost in repair quality.
We propose a highly compact two-part representation of a given graph G consisting of a graph summary and a set of corrections. The graph summary is an aggregate graph in which each node corresponds to a set of nodes in G, and each edge represents the edges between all pair of nodes in the two sets. On the other hand, the corrections portion specifies the list of edge-corrections that should be applied to the summary to recreate G. Our representations allow for both lossless and lossy graph compression with bounds on the introduced error. Further, in combination with the MDL principle, they yield highly intuitive coarse-level summaries of the input graph G. We develop algorithms to construct highly compressed graph representations with small sizes and guaranteed accuracy, and validate our approach through an extensive set of experiments with multiple reallife graph data sets.To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to compute graph summaries using the MDL principle, and use the summaries (along with corrections) to compress graphs with bounded error.
Recent years have witnessed an increasing interest in designing algorithms for querying and analyzing streaming data (i.e., data that is seen only once in a fixed order) with only limited memory. Providing (perhaps approximate) answers to queries over such continuous data streams is a crucial requirement for many application environments; examples include large telecom and IP network installations where performance data from different parts of the network needs to be continuously collected and analyzed.In this paper, we consider the problem of approximately answering general aggregate SQL queries over continuous data streams with limited memory. Our method relies on randomizing techniques that compute small "sketch" summaries of the streams that can then be used to provide approximate answers to aggregate queries with provable guarantees on the approximation error. We also demonstrate how existing statistical information on the base data (e.g., histograms) can be used in the proposed framework to improve the quality of the approximation provided by our algorithms. The key idea is to intelligently partition the domain of the underlying attribute(s) and, thus, decompose the sketching problem in a way that provably tightens our guarantees. Results of our experimental study with real-life as well as synthetic data streams indicate that sketches provide significantly more accurate answers compared to histograms for aggregate queries. This is especially true when our domain partitioning methods are employed to further boost the accuracy of the final estimates.
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