No Arabic abstract
The goals of Learning Analytics (LA) are manifold, among which helping students to understand their academic progress and improving their learning process, which are at the core of our work. To reach this goal, LA relies on educational data: students traces of activities on VLE, or academic, socio-demographic information, information about teachers, pedagogical resources, curricula, etc. The data sources that contain such information are multiple and diverse. Data mining, specifically pattern mining, aims at extracting valuable and understandable information from large datasets. In our work, we assume that multiple educational data sources form a rich dataset that can result in valuable patterns. Mining such data is thus a promising way to reach the goal of helping students. However, heterogeneity and interdependency within data lead to high computational complexity. We thus aim at designing low complex pattern mining algorithms that mine multi-source data, taking into consideration the dependency and heterogeneity among sources. The patterns formed are meaningful and interpretable, they can thus be directly used for students.
Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technology has resulted in massive amounts of proteomics and genomics data. This data is of no use if it is not properly analyzed. ETL (Extraction, Transformation, Loading) is an important step in designing data analytics applications. ETL requires proper understanding of features of data. Data format plays a key role in understanding of data, representation of data, space required to store data, data I/O during processing of data, intermediate results of processing, in-memory analysis of data and overall time required to process data. Different data mining and machine learning algorithms require input data in specific types and formats. This paper explores the data formats used by different tools and algorithms and also presents modern data formats that are used on Big Data Platform. It will help researchers and developers in choosing appropriate data format to be used for a particular tool or algorithm.
Acyclic schemes have numerous applications in databases and in machine learning, such as improved design, more efficient storage, and increased performance for queries and machine learning algorithms. Multivalued dependencies (MVDs) are the building blocks of acyclic schemes. The discovery from data of both MVDs and acyclic schemes is more challenging than other forms of data dependencies, such as Functional Dependencies, because these dependencies do not hold on subsets of data, and because they are very sensitive to noise in the data; for example a single wrong or missing tuple may invalidate the schema. In this paper we present Maimon, a system for discovering approximate acyclic schemes and MVDs from data. We give a principled definition of approximation, by using notions from information theory, then describe the two components of Maimon: mining for approximate MVDs, then reconstructing acyclic schemes from approximate MVDs. We conduct an experimental evaluation of Maimon on 20 real-world datasets, and show that it can scale up to 1M rows, and up to 30 columns.
With new emerging technologies, such as satellites and drones, archaeologists collect data over large areas. However, it becomes difficult to process such data in time. Archaeological data also have many different formats (images, texts, sensor data) and can be structured, semi-structured and unstructured. Such variety makes data difficult to collect, store, manage, search and analyze effectively. A few approaches have been proposed, but none of them covers the full data lifecycle nor provides an efficient data management system. Hence, we propose the use of a data lake to provide centralized data stores to host heterogeneous data, as well as tools for data quality checking, cleaning, transformation, and analysis. In this paper, we propose a generic, flexible and complete data lake architecture. Our metadata management system exploits goldMEDAL, which is the most complete metadata model currently available. Finally, we detail the concrete implementation of this architecture dedicated to an archaeological project.
Data analysis often involves comparing subsets of data across many dimensions for finding unusual trends and patterns. While the comparison between subsets of data can be expressed using SQL, they tend to be complex to write, and suffer from poor performance over large and high-dimensional datasets. In this paper, we propose a new logical operator COMPARE for relational databases that concisely captures the enumeration and comparison between subsets of data and greatly simplifies the expressing of a large class of comparative queries. We extend the database engine with optimization techniques that exploit the semantics of COMPARE to significantly improve the performance of such queries. We have implemented these extensions inside Microsoft SQL Server, a commercial DBMS engine. Our extensive evaluation on synthetic and real-world datasets shows that COMPARE results in a significant speedup over existing approaches, including physical plans generated by todays database systems, user-defined function (UDF), as well as middleware solutions that compare subsets outside the databases.
Big data benchmarking is particularly important and provides applicable yardsticks for evaluating booming big data systems. However, wide coverage and great complexity of big data computing impose big challenges on big data benchmarking. How can we construct a benchmark suite using a minimum set of units of computation to represent diversity of big data analytics workloads? Big data dwarfs are abstractions of extracting frequently appearing operations in big data computing. One dwarf represents one unit of computation, and big data workloads are decomposed into one or more dwarfs. Furthermore, dwarfs workloads rather than vast real workloads are more cost-efficient and representative to evaluate big data systems. In this paper, we extensively investigate six most important or emerging application domains i.e. search engine, social network, e-commerce, multimedia, bioinformatics and astronomy. After analyzing forty representative algorithms, we single out eight dwarfs workloads in big data analytics other than OLAP, which are linear algebra, sampling, logic operations, transform operations, set operations, graph operations, statistic operations and sort.