Toward efficient multidimensional subspace skyline computation

Skyline queries have attracted considerable attention to assist multicriteria analysis of large-scale datasets. In this paper, we focus on multidimensional subspace skyline computation that has been actively studied for two approaches. First, to narrow down a full-space skyline, users may consider multiple subspace skylines reflecting their interest. For this purpose, we tackle the concept of a skycube, which consists of all possible non-empty subspace skylines in a given full space. Second, to understand diverse semantics of subspace skylines, we address skyline groups in which a skyline point (or a set of skyline points) is annotated with decisive subspaces. Our primary contributions are to identify common building blocks of the two approaches and to develop orthogonal optimization principles that benefit both approaches. Our experimental results show the efficiency of proposed algorithms by comparing them with state-of-the-art algorithms in both synthetic and real-life datasets.     

Gratis lattice points for multidimensional integration

The computation of optimal coefficients for higher dimensionss and larger modulesN by means of the methods known hitherto leads to practically insurmountable problems regarding the computing time needed. In this note we give a method for computing “useful coefficients”, where the computation of these coefficients is immediate and where the computing time is practically negligible for anys andN. Whereas the theoretical efficiency of those “useful coefficients” is roughly speaking half the efficiency of the best possible coefficients, all practical tests indicate that our methods lead to optimal performance as well. A series of computational comparisons between the “useful coefficients” and the optimal ones is enclosed.     

Finding users preferences from large-scale online reviews for personalized recommendation

Along with the growth of Internet and electronic commerce, online consumer reviews have become a prevalent and rich source of information for both consumers and merchants. Numerous reviews record massive consumers’ opinions on products or services, which offer valuable information about users’ preferences for various aspects of different entities. This paper proposes a novel approach to finding the user preferences from free-text online reviews, where a user-preference-based collaborative filtering approach, namely UPCF, is developed to discover important aspects to users, as well as to reflect users’ individual needs for different aspects for recommendation. Extensive experiments are conducted on the data from a real-world online review platform, with the results showing that the proposed approach outperforms other approaches in effectively predicting the overall ratings of entities to target users for personalized recommendations. It also demonstrates that the approach has an advantage in dealing with sparse data, and can provide the recommendation results with desirable understandability.     

Neural skyline filter for accelerating skyline search algorithms

The skyline search problem has been identified as one of the key problems in database research. None of the developed skyline search algorithms include the use of a filter to facilitate the search process. This paper proposes a novel modification involving the use of skyline filters to reduce the search space of a skyline problem by removing data points that cannot provide a viable skyline result. Three filters based on the concept of neural networks are proposed in this paper. The result is a reduction in execution time achieved through the reduction of the input tuples. The proposed filters may be used in conjunction with any existing skyline search algorithm. This is the first study to apply neural network technology to the skyline problem. Comprehensive simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed skyline filtering system.     

适于高维空间搜索的自组织学习算法

提出了一种有别于当前优化算法框架的自组织学习算法(self-organizing learning algorithm,SLA),该算法融合遗传算法并行搜索与模拟退火串行搜索,结合粒子群学习机制和禁忌搜索机制,实现了系统与环境的交互学习,能够很好地处理传统优化方无法应对的高维非线性优化问题.SLA分自学习和互学习两个智能化学习阶段,先进行基于自学习机制的邻域禁忌搜索,保证局部极值的收敛,然后通过信息共享平台,进行基于互学习机制的广域禁忌搜索,保证全局极值的收敛.系统通过与环境交互学习而自适应地调整搜索策略和相关参数,使得搜索过程能够有效地避免盲目性,而具有相当的自组织性.最后,通过高维测试函数的对比仿真实验表明,SLA在由小型低维空间转入超大型高维空间时,仍能够与环境保持稳定,透明的交互学习,其全局搜索能力和整体稳健性明显优于其它搜索方法.     

On recommendation problems beyond points of interest

Recommendation systems aim to recommend items or packages of items that are likely to be of interest to users. Previous work on recommendation systems has mostly focused on recommending points of interest (POI), to identify and suggest top-k items or packages that meet selection criteria and satisfy compatibility constraints on items in a package, where the (packages of) items are ranked by their usefulness to the users. As opposed to prior work, this paper investigates two issues beyond POI recommendation that are also important to recommendation systems. When there exist no sufficiently many POI that can be recommended, we propose (1) query relaxation recommendation to help users revise their selection criteria, or (2) adjustment recommendation to guide recommendation systems to modify their item collections, such that the users׳ requirements can be satisfied.We study two related problems, to decide (1) whether the query expressing the selection criteria can be relaxed to a limited extent, and (2) whether we can update a bounded number of items, such that the users can get desired recommendations. We establish the upper and lower bounds of these problems, all matching, for both combined and data complexity, when selection criteria and compatibility constraints are expressed in a variety of query languages, for both item recommendation and package recommendation. To understand where the complexity comes from, we also study the impact of variable sizes of packages, compatibility constraints and selection criteria on the analyses of these problems. Our results indicate that in most cases the complexity bounds of query relaxation and adjustment recommendation are comparable to their counterparts of the basic recommendation problem for testing whether a given set of (resp. packages of) items makes top-k items (resp. packages). In other words, extending recommendation systems with the query relaxation and adjustment recommendation functionalities typically does not incur extra overhead.     

多维加权社会网络中的个性化推荐算法

个性化推荐是解决Internet中信息过载的重要工具,在研究有关个性化推荐的技术和相关动态的基础上,以用户实际应用为驱动,提出一种多维加权社会网络中的个性化推荐算法。首先,该算法构建了用户之间的多维加权网络;然后利用复杂网络的聚类方法——CPM算法寻找邻居用户;最后基于用户之间的相似性做出推荐。实验结果表明,应用该算法的多维网络的推荐系统与基于内容推荐系统和协同过滤推荐系统相比,有较高的查全率和准确率,个性化推荐质量有了一定程度的提高。     

Finding nondegenerate Hopf bifurcation points for four-dimensional two-parametric systems

We establish a numerically feasible algorithm to find a simplicial approximation A to a certain part of the boundary of the set of stable (or Hurwitz) polynomials of degree 4. Moreover, we have that . Using this, we build an algorithm to find a piecewise-linear approximation to the intersection curve of a given surface contained in ⁴ with . We have also devised an efficient computer program to perform all these operations. The main motivation is to find the curve of nondegenerate bifurcation points in parameter space for a given 2-parametric Hopf bifurcation problem of dimension 4.     

Optimizing target selection complexity of a recommendation system by skyline query and multi-criteria decision analysis

Various factors related to user consideration cause a target selection problem that may lead users to receive unexpected or confusing results. Traditionally, the recommendation system is constructed to help the user filter out unrelated targets and recommend targets that may be of interest to the user. However, the complexity of target selection requires a more advanced decision-making analysis to offer support. Determining how to optimize the target selection complexity of a recommendation system has become a critical challenge. This study proposes a novel approach using skyline query and multi-criteria decision analysis to recommend Top-k targets for user selection. Skyline query domination reduces the complexity of target selection by filtering out non-dominant candidates and keeping the dominant candidates for multi-criteria decision analysis. After the skyline query processing, the multi-criteria decision analysis is optimized, producing a Top-k ranking order of the candidate targets. The experiment illustrates an empirical case study to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The contribution is optimizing the target selecting complexity of the recommendation system to solve the target selection problem.

     

Personalized recommendation of popular blog articles for mobile applications

Weblogs have emerged as a new communication and publication medium on the Internet for diffusing the latest useful information. Providing value-added mobile services, such as blog articles, is increasingly important to attract mobile users to mobile commerce, in order to benefit from the proliferation and convenience of using mobile devices to receive information any time and anywhere. However, there are a tremendous number of blog articles, and mobile users generally have difficulty in browsing weblogs owing to the limitations of mobile devices. Accordingly, providing mobile users with blog articles that suit their particular interests is an important issue. Very little research, however, has focused on this issue.In this work, we propose a novel Customized Content Service on a mobile device (m-CCS) to filter and push blog articles to mobile users. The m-CCS includes a novel forecasting approach to predict the latest popular blog topics based on the trend of time-sensitive popularity of weblogs. Mobile users may, however, have different interests regarding the latest popular blog topics. Thus, the m-CCS further analyzes the mobile users’ browsing logs to determine their interests, which are then combined with the latest popular blog topics to derive their preferred blog topics and articles. A novel hybrid approach is proposed to recommend blog articles by integrating personalized popularity of topic clusters, item-based collaborative filtering (CF) and attention degree (click times) of blog articles. The experiment result demonstrates that the m-CCS system can effectively recommend mobile users’ desired blog articles with respect to both popularity and personal interests.     

Finding the stationary points of semiregular functions

The generalized gradient method is applied to find the stationary points of semiregular functions. Conditions are derived when the image of the set of stationary points does not contain nonempty intervals.Translated from Kibernetika i Sistemnyi Analiz, No. 4, pp. 104–110, July–August, 1991.     

Robust recommendation method based on suspicious users measurement and multidimensional trust

The existing collaborative recommendation algorithms have poor robustness against shilling attacks. To address this problem, in this paper we propose a robust recommendation method based on suspicious users measurement and multidimensional trust. Firstly, we establish the relevance vector machine classifier according to the user profile features to identify and measure the suspicious users in the user rating database. Secondly, we mine the implicit trust relation among users based on the user-item rating data, and construct a reliable multidimensional trust model by integrating the user suspicion information. Finally, we combine the reliable multidimensional trust model, the neighbor model and matrix factorization model to devise a robust recommendation algorithm. The experimental results on the MovieLens dataset show that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods in terms of both recommendation accuracy and robustness.     

Exploring correlation for fast skyline computation

Scaling skyline queries over high-dimensional datasets remains to be challenging due to the fact that most existing algorithms assume dimensional independence when establishing the worst-case complexity by discarding correlation distribution. In this paper, we present HashSkyline, a systematic and correlation-aware approach for scaling skyline queries over high-dimensional datasets with three novel features: First, it offers a fast hash-based method to prune non-skyline points by utilizing data correlation characteristics and speed up the overall skyline evaluation for correlated datasets. Second, we develop \(HashSkyline_{GPU}\), which can dramatically reduce the response time for anti-correlated and independent datasets by capitalizing on the parallel processing power of GPUs. Third, the HashSkyline approach uses the pivot cell-based mechanism combined with the correlation threshold to determine the correlation distribution characteristics for a given dataset, enabling adaptive configuration of HashSkyline for skyline query evaluation by auto-switching of \(HashSkyline_{CPU}\) and \(HashSkyline_{GPU}\). We evaluate the validity of HashSkyline using both synthetic datasets and real datasets. Our experiments show that HashSkyline consumes significantly less pre-processing cost and achieves significantly higher overall query performance, compared to existing state-of-the-art algorithms.     

Topic-tracking-based dynamic user modeling with TV recommendation applications

One of the challenging issues in TV recommendation applications based on implicit rating data is how to make robust recommendation for the users who irregularly watch TV programs and for the users who have their time-varying preferences on watching TV programs. To achieve the robust recommendation for such users, it is important to capture dynamic behaviors of user preference on watched TV programs over time. In this paper, we propose a topic tracking based dynamic user model (TDUM) that extends the previous multi-scale dynamic topic model (MDTM) by incorporating topic-tracking into dynamic user modeling. In the proposed TDUM, the prior of the current user preference is estimated as a weighted combination of the previously learned preferences of a TV user in multi-time spans where the optimal weight set is found in the sense of the evidence maximization of the Bayesian probability. So, the proposed TDUM supports the dynamics of public users’ preferences on TV programs for collaborative filtering based TV program recommendation and the highly ranked TV programs by similar watching taste user group (topic) can be traced with the same topic labels epoch by epoch. We also propose a rank model for TV program recommendation. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed TDUM and rank model, we use a real data set of the TV programs watched by 1,999 TV users for 7 months. The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed TDUM outperforms the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model and the MDTM in log-likelihood for the topic modeling performance, and also shows its superiority compared to LDA, MDTM and Bayesian Personalized Rank Matrix Factorization (BPRMF) for TV program recommendation performance in terms of top-N precision-recall.     

Dynamic tolerant skyline operation for decision making

Skyline operation is typical multicriteria decision making well documented in data engineering. The assumption of skyline operation is settled human preference, which may be subject to huge challenges in practical decision-making applications because it simplifies preference scenarios that are usually dynamic. This study establishes the mathematical formulation of dynamic preference in real settings. A decision approach called tolerant skyline operation (T-skyline) is completely developed, including its conceptual modeling, computation methods, and a skyline maintenance mechanism on a database. The method is established and its computation mechanism is designed, and both are evaluated through an empirical study of personnel selection and evaluation. We also analyze computation efficiency and system stability. The decision targets are fully achieved, the computation results are satisfactory, and the computation efficiency is rational. The effectiveness and advantages of the approach are significant, as illustrated in different real-world settings. Experiments facilitated the examination of the design and development of T-skyline operation by adopting real and public datasets to evaluate players in the National Basketball Association in the United States. The experiment results validate the practical viability of our decision model, which can inspire discussions in sport industries. The methodology used in this study is valuable for further academic research, particularly for the interdisciplinary investigation of decision making and data engineering.     

A clustering based approach for skyline diversity

Skyline query processing has recently received a lot of attention in database and data-mining communities. To the best of our knowledge, the existing researches mainly focus on considering how to efficiently return the whole skyline set. However, when the cardinality and dimensionality of input objects increase, the number of skylines grows exponentially, and hence this “huge” skyline set is completely useless to users. On the other hand, in most real applications, the objects are usually clustered, and therefore many objects have similar attribute values. Motivated by the above facts, in this paper, we present a novel type of SkyCluster query to capture the skyline diversity and improve the usefulness of skyline result. The SkyCluster query integrates K-means clustering into skyline computation, and returns K “representative” and “diverse” skyline objects to users. To process such query, a straightforward approach is to simply integrate the existing techniques developed for skyline-only and clustering-only together. But this approach is costly since both skyline computation and K-means clustering are all CPU-sensitive. We propose an efficient evaluation approach which is based on the circinal index to seamlessly integrate subspace skyline computation, K-means clustering and representatives selection. Also, we present a novel optimization heuristic to further improve the query performance. Experimental study shows that our approach is both efficient and effective.     

Hybrid-LP: Finding advanced starting points for simplex,and pivoting LP methods

The simplex method has proven its efficiency in practice for linear programming (LP) problems of various types and sizes. However, its theoretical worst-case complexity in addition to its poor performance for very large-scale LP problems has driven researchers to develop alternative methods for LP problems. In this paper, we develop the hybrid-LP; a two-phase approach for solving LP problems. Rather than following a path of extreme points on the boundary of the feasible region as in the simplex method, the first phase of the hybrid-LP moves through the interior of the feasible region to obtain an improved and advanced initial basic feasible solution (BFS). Then, in the second phase simplex or other LP methods can be used to find the optimal solution.     

An optimal index reshuffle algorithm for multidimensional arraysand its applications for parallel architectures

Reshuffling elements of a multidimensional array according to an index operation traditionally requires an auxiliary buffer of the same size as the original array. We describe a new in-place algorithm using vacancy tracking cycles with minimum memory access which eliminates the buffer array and the related copy-back, speeding up the reshuffle significantly for large arrays. The algorithm can be parallelized using a multithread approach on shared-memory multiprocessor computers. On distributed-memory multiprocessor computers, the index reshuffle of distributed multidimensional arrays amounts to a remapping of processor domains and is carried out using the in-place local algorithm combined with a global exchange algorithm. Implementation and test results on CRAY T3E and IBM SP indicate the effectiveness of the algorithm