Scalable Processing of Spatial-Keyword Queries
Text data that is associated with location data has become ubiquitous. A tweet is an example of this type of data, where the text in a tweet is associated with the location where the tweet has been issued. We use the term spatial-keyword data to refer to this type of data. Spatial-keyword data is being generated at massive scale. Almost all online transactions have an associated spatial trace. The spatial trace is derived from GPS coordinates, IP addresses, or cell-phone-tower locations. Hundreds of millions or even billions of spatial-keyword objects are being generated daily. Spatial-keyword data has numerous applications that require efficient processing and management of massive amounts of spatial-keyword data. This book starts by overviewing some important applications of spatial-keyword data, and demonstrates the scale at which spatial-keyword data is being generated. Then, it formalizes and classifies the various types of queries that execute over spatial-keyword data.Next, it discusses important and desirable properties of spatial-keyword query languages that are needed to express queries over spatial-keyword data. As will be illustrated, existing spatial-keyword query languages vary in the types of spatial-keyword queries that they can support. There are many systems that process spatial-keyword queries. Systems differ from each other in various aspects, e.g., whether the system is batch-oriented or stream-based, and whether the system is centralized or distributed. Moreover, spatial-keyword systems vary in the types of queries that they support. Finally, systems vary in the types of indexing techniques that they adopt. This book provides an overview of the main spatial-keyword data-management systems (SKDMSs), and classifies them according to their features. Moreover, the book describes the main approaches adopted when indexing spatial-keyword data in the centralized and distributed settings. Several case studies of {SKDMSs} are presentedalong with the applications and query types that these {SKDMSs} are targeted for and the indexing techniques they utilize for processing their queries. Optimizing the performance and the query processing of {SKDMSs} still has many research challenges and open problems. The book concludes with a discussion about several important and open research-problems in the domain of scalable spatial-keyword processing.
Exploratory Causal Analysis with Time Series Data
Many scientific disciplines rely on observational data of systems for which it is difficult (or impossible) to implement controlled experiments. Data analysis techniques are required for identifying causal information and relationships directly from such observational data. This need has led to the development of many different time series causality approaches and tools including transfer entropy, convergent cross-mapping (CCM), and Granger causality statistics. A practicing analyst can explore the literature to find many proposals for identifying drivers and causal connections in time series data sets. Exploratory causal analysis (ECA) provides a framework for exploring potential causal structures in time series data sets and is characterized by a myopic goal to determine which data series from a given set of series might be seen as the primary driver. In this work, ECA is used on several synthetic and empirical data sets, and it is found that all of the tested time series causality tools agree with each other (and intuitive notions of causality) for many simple systems but can provide conflicting causal inferences for more complicated systems. It is proposed that such disagreements between different time series causality tools during ECA might provide deeper insight into the data than could be found otherwise.
Mining Latent Entity Structures
The "big data" era is characterized by an explosion of information in the form of digital data collections, ranging from scientific knowledge, to social media, news, and everyone's daily life. Examples of such collections include scientific publications, enterprise logs, news articles, social media, and general web pages. Valuable knowledge about multi-typed entities is often hidden in the unstructured or loosely structured, interconnected data. Mining latent structures around entities uncovers hidden knowledge such as implicit topics, phrases, entity roles and relationships. In this monograph, we investigate the principles and methodologies of mining latent entity structures from massive unstructured and interconnected data. We propose a text-rich information network model for modeling data in many different domains. This leads to a series of new principles and powerful methodologies for mining latent structures, including (1) latent topical hierarchy, (2) quality topical phrases, (3)entity roles in hierarchical topical communities, and (4) entity relations. This book also introduces applications enabled by the mined structures and points out some promising research directions.
Data Management in Machine Learning Systems
Large-scale data analytics using machine learning (ML) underpins many modern data-driven applications. ML systems provide means of specifying and executing these ML workloads in an efficient and scalable manner. Data management is at the heart of many ML systems due to data-driven application characteristics, data-centric workload characteristics, and system architectures inspired by classical data management techniques. In this book, we follow this data-centric view of ML systems and aim to provide a comprehensive overview of data management in ML systems for the end-to-end data science or ML lifecycle. We review multiple interconnected lines of work: (1) ML support in database (DB) systems, (2) DB-inspired ML systems, and (3) ML lifecycle systems. Covered topics include: in-database analytics via query generation and user-defined functions, factorized and statistical-relational learning; optimizing compilers for ML workloads; execution strategies and hardware accelerators;data access methods such as compression, partitioning and indexing; resource elasticity and cloud markets; as well as systems for data preparation for ML, model selection, model management, model debugging, and model serving. Given the rapidly evolving field, we strive for a balance between an up-to-date survey of ML systems, an overview of the underlying concepts and techniques, as well as pointers to open research questions. Hence, this book might serve as a starting point for both systems researchers and developers.
Datalog and Logic Databases
The use of logic in databases started in the late 1960s. In the early 1970s Codd formalized databases in terms of the relational calculus and the relational algebra. A major influence on the use of logic in databases was the development of the field of logic programming. Logic provides a convenient formalism for studying classical database problems and has the important property of being declarative, that is, it allows one to express what she wants rather than how to get it. For a long time, relational calculus and algebra were considered the relational database languages. However, there are simple operations, such as computing the transitive closure of a graph, which cannot be expressed with these languages. Datalog is a declarative query language for relational databases based on the logic programming paradigm. One of the peculiarities that distinguishes Datalog from query languages like relational algebra and calculus is recursion, which gives Datalog the capability to express queries like computing a graph transitive closure. Recent years have witnessed a revival of interest in Datalog in a variety of emerging application domains such as data integration, information extraction, networking, program analysis, security, cloud computing, ontology reasoning, and many others. The aim of this book is to present the basics of Datalog, some of its extensions, and recent applications to different domains.
Data Exploration Using Example-Based Methods
Data usually comes in a plethora of formats and dimensions, rendering the exploration and information extraction processes challenging. Thus, being able to perform exploratory analyses in the data with the intent of having an immediate glimpse on some of the data properties is becoming crucial. Exploratory analyses should be simple enough to avoid complicate declarative languages (such as SQL) and mechanisms, and at the same time retain the flexibility and expressiveness of such languages. Recently, we have witnessed a rediscovery of the so-called example-based methods, in which the user, or the analyst, circumvents query languages by using examples as input. An example is a representative of the intended results, or in other words, an item from the result set. Example-based methods exploit inherent characteristics of the data to infer the results that the user has in mind, but may not able to (easily) express. They can be useful in cases where a user is looking for information in an unfamiliar dataset, when the task is particularly challenging like finding duplicate items, or simply when they are exploring the data. In this book, we present an excursus over the main methods for exploratory analysis, with a particular focus on example-based methods. We show how that different data types require different techniques, and present algorithms that are specifically designed for relational, textual, and graph data. The book presents also the challenges and the new frontiers of machine learning in online settings which recently attracted the attention of the database community. The lecture concludes with a vision for further research and applications in this area.
Fundamentals of Physical Design and Query Compilation
Query compilation is the problem of translating user requests formulated over purely conceptual and domain specific ways of understanding data, commonly called logical designs, to efficient executable programs called query plans. Such plans access various concrete data sources through their low-level often iterator-based interfaces. An appreciation of the concrete data sources, their interfaces and how such capabilities relate to logical design is commonly called a physical design. This book is an introduction to the fundamental methods underlying database technology that solves the problem of query compilation. The methods are presented in terms of first-order logic which serves as the vehicle for specifying physical design, expressing user requests and query plans, and understanding how query plans implement user requests. Table of Contents: Introduction / Logical Design and User Queries / Basic Physical Design and Query Plans / On Practical Physical Design / Query Compilation and Plan Synthesis / Updating Data
P2P Techniques for Decentralized Applications
As an alternative to traditional client-server systems, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems provide major advantages in terms of scalability, autonomy and dynamic behavior of peers, and decentralization of control. Thus, they are well suited for large-scale data sharing in distributed environments. Most of the existing P2P approaches for data sharing rely on either structured networks (e.g., DHTs) for efficient indexing, or unstructured networks for ease of deployment, or some combination. However, these approaches have some limitations, such as lack of freedom for data placement in DHTs, and high latency and high network traffic in unstructured networks. To address these limitations, gossip protocols which are easy to deploy and scale well, can be exploited. In this book, we will give an overview of these different P2P techniques and architectures, discuss their trade-offs, and illustrate their use for decentralizing several large-scale data sharing applications. Table of Contents: P2P Overlays, Query Routing, and Gossiping / Content Distribution in P2P Systems / Recommendation Systems / Top-k Query Processing in P2P Systems
Query Answer Authentication
In data publishing, the owner delegates the role of satisfying user queries to a third-party publisher. As the servers of the publisher may be untrusted or susceptible to attacks, we cannot assume that they would always process queries correctly, hence there is a need for users to authenticate their query answers. This book introduces various notions that the research community has studied for defining the correctness of a query answer. In particular, it is important to guarantee the completeness, authenticity and minimality of the answer, as well as its freshness. We present authentication mechanisms for a wide variety of queries in the context of relational and spatial databases, text retrieval, and data streams. We also explain the cryptographic protocols from which the authentication mechanisms derive their security properties. Table of Contents: Introduction / Cryptography Foundation / Relational Queries / Spatial Queries / Text Search Queries / Data Streams / Conclusion
Similarity Joins in Relational Database Systems
State-of-the-art database systems manage and process a variety of complex objects, including strings and trees. For such objects equality comparisons are often not meaningful and must be replaced by similarity comparisons. This book describes the concepts and techniques to incorporate similarity into database systems. We start out by discussing the properties of strings and trees, and identify the edit distance as the de facto standard for comparing complex objects. Since the edit distance is computationally expensive, token-based distances have been introduced to speed up edit distance computations. The basic idea is to decompose complex objects into sets of tokens that can be compared efficiently. Token-based distances are used to compute an approximation of the edit distance and prune expensive edit distance calculations. A key observation when computing similarity joins is that many of the object pairs, for which the similarity is computed, are very different from each other. Filters exploit this property to improve the performance of similarity joins. A filter preprocesses the input data sets and produces a set of candidate pairs. The distance function is evaluated on the candidate pairs only. We describe the essential query processing techniques for filters based on lower and upper bounds. For token equality joins we describe prefix, size, positional and partitioning filters, which can be used to avoid the computation of small intersections that are not needed since the similarity would be too low.
Mining Human Mobility in Location-Based Social Networks
In recent years, there has been a rapid growth of location-based social networking services, such as Foursquare and Facebook Places, which have attracted an increasing number of users and greatly enriched their urban experience. Typical location-based social networking sites allow a user to "check in" at a real-world POI (point of interest, e.g., a hotel, restaurant, theater, etc.), leave tips toward the POI, and share the check-in with their online friends. The check-in action bridges the gap between real world and online social networks, resulting in a new type of social networks, namely location-based social networks (LBSNs). Compared to traditional GPS data, location-based social networks data contains unique properties with abundant heterogeneous information to reveal human mobility, i.e., "when and where a user (who) has been to for what," corresponding to an unprecedented opportunity to better understand human mobility from spatial, temporal, social, and content aspects. The mining and understanding of human mobility can further lead to effective approaches to improve current location-based services from mobile marketing to recommender systems, providing users more convenient life experience than before. This book takes a data mining perspective to offer an overview of studying human mobility in location-based social networks and illuminate a wide range of related computational tasks. It introduces basic concepts, elaborates associated challenges, reviews state-of-the-art algorithms with illustrative examples and real-world LBSN datasets, and discusses effective evaluation methods in mining human mobility. In particular, we illustrate unique characteristics and research opportunities of LBSN data, present representative tasks of mining human mobility on location-based social networks, including capturing user mobility patterns to understand when and where a user commonly goes (location prediction), and exploiting user preferences and location profiles to investigate where and when a user wants to explore (location recommendation), along with studying a user's check-in activity in terms of why a user goes to a certain location.
Perspectives on Business Intelligence
In the 1980s, traditional Business Intelligence (BI) systems focused on the delivery of reports that describe the state of business activities in the past, such as for questions like "How did our sales perform during the last quarter?" A decade later, there was a shift to more interactive content that presented how the business was performing at the present time, answering questions like "How are we doing right now?" Today the focus of BI users are looking into the future. "Given what I did before and how I am currently doing this quarter, how will I do next quarter?" Furthermore, fuelled by the demands of Big Data, BI systems are going through a time of incredible change. Predictive analytics, high volume data, unstructured data, social data, mobile, consumable analytics, and data visualization are all examples of demands and capabilities that have become critical within just the past few years, and are growing at an unprecedented pace. This book introduces research problems and solutions on various aspects central to next-generation BI systems. It begins with a chapter on an industry perspective on how BI has evolved, and discusses how game-changing trends have drastically reshaped the landscape of BI. One of the game changers is the shift toward the consumerization of BI tools. As a result, for BI tools to be successfully used by business users (rather than IT departments), the tools need a business model, rather than a data model. One chapter of the book surveys four different types of business modeling. However, even with the existence of a business model for users to express queries, the data that can meet the needs are still captured within a data model. The next chapter on vivification addresses the problem of closing the gap, which is often significant, between the business and the data models. Moreover, Big Data forces BI systems to integrate and consolidate multiple, and often wildly different, data sources. One chapter gives an overview of several integration architectures for dealing with the challenges that need to be overcome. While the book so far focuses on the usual structured relational data, the remaining chapters turn to unstructured data, an ever-increasing and important component of Big Data. One chapter on information extraction describes methods for dealing with the extraction of relations from free text and the web. Finally, BI users need tools to visualize and interpret new and complex types of information in a way that is compelling, intuitive, but accurate. The last chapter gives an overview of information visualization for decision support and text.
Graph Mining
What does the Web look like? How can we find patterns, communities, outliers, in a social network? Which are the most central nodes in a network? These are the questions that motivate this work. Networks and graphs appear in many diverse settings, for example in social networks, computer-communication networks (intrusion detection, traffic management), protein-protein interaction networks in biology, document-text bipartite graphs in text retrieval, person-account graphs in financial fraud detection, and others. In this work, first we list several surprising patterns that real graphs tend to follow. Then we give a detailed list of generators that try to mirror these patterns. Generators are important, because they can help with "what if" scenarios, extrapolations, and anonymization. Then we provide a list of powerful tools for graph analysis, and specifically spectral methods (Singular Value Decomposition (SVD)), tensors, and case studies like the famous "pageRank" algorithm and the "HITS" algorithm for ranking web search results. Finally, we conclude with a survey of tools and observations from related fields like sociology, which provide complementary viewpoints. Table of Contents: Introduction / Patterns in Static Graphs / Patterns in Evolving Graphs / Patterns in Weighted Graphs / Discussion: The Structure of Specific Graphs / Discussion: Power Laws and Deviations / Summary of Patterns / Graph Generators / Preferential Attachment and Variants / Incorporating Geographical Information / The RMat / Graph Generation by Kronecker Multiplication / Summary and Practitioner's Guide / SVD, Random Walks, and Tensors / Tensors / Community Detection / Influence/Virus Propagation and Immunization / Case Studies / Social Networks / Other Related Work / Conclusions
Spatial Data Management
Spatial database management deals with the storage, indexing, and querying of data with spatial features, such as location and geometric extent. Many applications require the efficient management of spatial data, including Geographic Information Systems, Computer Aided Design, and Location Based Services. The goal of this book is to provide the reader with an overview of spatial data management technology, with an emphasis on indexing and search techniques. It first introduces spatial data models and queries and discusses the main issues of extending a database system to support spatial data. It presents indexing approaches for spatial data, with a focus on the R-tree. Query evaluation and optimization techniques for the most popular spatial query types (selections, nearest neighbor search, and spatial joins) are portrayed for data in Euclidean spaces and spatial networks. The book concludes by demonstrating the ample application of spatial data management technology on a wide range ofrelated application domains: management of spatio-temporal data and high-dimensional feature vectors, multi-criteria ranking, data mining and OLAP, privacy-preserving data publishing, and spatial keyword search. Table of Contents: Introduction / Spatial Data / Indexing / Spatial Query Evaluation / Spatial Networks / Applications of Spatial Data Management Technology
Information and Influence Propagation in Social Networks
Research on social networks has exploded over the last decade. To a large extent, this has been fueled by the spectacular growth of social media and online social networking sites, which continue growing at a very fast pace, as well as by the increasing availability of very large social network datasets for purposes of research. A rich body of this research has been devoted to the analysis of the propagation of information, influence, innovations, infections, practices and customs through networks. Can we build models to explain the way these propagations occur? How can we validate our models against any available real datasets consisting of a social network and propagation traces that occurred in the past? These are just some questions studied by researchers in this area. Information propagation models find applications in viral marketing, outbreak detection, finding key blog posts to read in order to catch important stories, finding leaders or trendsetters, information feed ranking, etc. A number of algorithmic problems arising in these applications have been abstracted and studied extensively by researchers under the garb of influence maximization. This book starts with a detailed description of well-established diffusion models, including the independent cascade model and the linear threshold model, that have been successful at explaining propagation phenomena. We describe their properties as well as numerous extensions to them, introducing aspects such as competition, budget, and time-criticality, among many others. We delve deep into the key problem of influence maximization, which selects key individuals to activate in order to influence a large fraction of a network. Influence maximization in classic diffusion models including both the independent cascade and the linear threshold models is computationally intractable, more precisely #P-hard, and we describe several approximation algorithms and scalable heuristics that have been proposed in the literature. Finally, we also deal with key issues that need to be tackled in order to turn this research into practice, such as learning the strength with which individuals in a network influence each other, as well as the practical aspects of this research including the availability of datasets and software tools for facilitating research. We conclude with a discussion of various research problems that remain open, both from a technical perspective and from the viewpoint of transferring the results of research into industry strength applications.
Probabilistic Approaches to Recommendations
The importance of accurate recommender systems has been widely recognized by academia and industry, and recommendation is rapidly becoming one of the most successful applications of data mining and machine learning. Understanding and predicting the choices and preferences of users is a challenging task: real-world scenarios involve users behaving in complex situations, where prior beliefs, specific tendencies, and reciprocal influences jointly contribute to determining the preferences of users toward huge amounts of information, services, and products. Probabilistic modeling represents a robust formal mathematical framework to model these assumptions and study their effects in the recommendation process. This book starts with a brief summary of the recommendation problem and its challenges and a review of some widely used techniques Next, we introduce and discuss probabilistic approaches for modeling preference data. We focus our attention on methods based on latent factors, such as mixture models, probabilistic matrix factorization, and topic models, for explicit and implicit preference data. These methods represent a significant advance in the research and technology of recommendation. The resulting models allow us to identify complex patterns in preference data, which can be exploited to predict future purchases effectively. The extreme sparsity of preference data poses serious challenges to the modeling of user preferences, especially in the cases where few observations are available. Bayesian inference techniques elegantly address the need for regularization, and their integration with latent factor modeling helps to boost the performances of the basic techniques. We summarize the strengths and weakness of several approaches by considering two different but related evaluation perspectives, namely, rating prediction and recommendation accuracy. Furthermore, we describe how probabilistic methods based on latent factors enable the exploitation of preference patterns in novel applications beyond rating prediction or recommendation accuracy. We finally discuss the application of probabilistic techniques in two additional scenarios, characterized by the availability of side information besides preference data. In summary, the book categorizes the myriad probabilistic approaches to recommendations and provides guidelines for their adoption in real-world situations.
Incomplete Data and Data Dependencies in Relational Databases
The chase has long been used as a central tool to analyze dependencies and their effect on queries. It has been applied to different relevant problems in database theory such as query optimization, query containment and equivalence, dependency implication, and database schema design. Recent years have seen a renewed interest in the chase as an important tool in several database applications, such as data exchange and integration, query answering in incomplete data, and many others. It is well known that the chase algorithm might be non-terminating and thus, in order for it to find practical applicability, it is crucial to identify cases where its termination is guaranteed. Another important aspect to consider when dealing with the chase is that it can introduce null values into the database, thereby leading to incomplete data. Thus, in several scenarios where the chase is used the problem of dealing with data dependencies and incomplete data arises. This book discusses fundamental issues concerning data dependencies and incomplete data with a particular focus on the chase and its applications in different database areas. We report recent results about the crucial issue of identifying conditions that guarantee the chase termination. Different database applications where the chase is a central tool are discussed with particular attention devoted to query answering in the presence of data dependencies and database schema design. Table of Contents: Introduction / Relational Databases / Incomplete Databases / The Chase Algorithm / Chase Termination / Data Dependencies and Normal Forms / Universal Repairs / Chase and Database Applications
Probabilistic Databases
Probabilistic databases are databases where the value of some attributes or the presence of some records are uncertain and known only with some probability. Applications in many areas such as information extraction, RFID and scientific data management, data cleaning, data integration, and financial risk assessment produce large volumes of uncertain data, which are best modeled and processed by a probabilistic database. This book presents the state of the art in representation formalisms and query processing techniques for probabilistic data. It starts by discussing the basic principles for representing large probabilistic databases, by decomposing them into tuple-independent tables, block-independent-disjoint tables, or U-databases. Then it discusses two classes of techniques for query evaluation on probabilistic databases. In extensional query evaluation, the entire probabilistic inference can be pushed into the database engine and, therefore, processed as effectively as the evaluation of standard SQL queries. The relational queries that can be evaluated this way are called safe queries. In intensional query evaluation, the probabilistic inference is performed over a propositional formula called lineage expression: every relational query can be evaluated this way, but the data complexity dramatically depends on the query being evaluated, and can be #P-hard. The book also discusses some advanced topics in probabilistic data management such as top-k query processing, sequential probabilistic databases, indexing and materialized views, and Monte Carlo databases. Table of Contents: Overview / Data and Query Model / The Query Evaluation Problem / Extensional Query Evaluation / Intensional Query Evaluation / Advanced Techniques
Deep Web Query Interface Understanding and Integration
There are millions of searchable data sources on the Web and to a large extent their contents can only be reached through their own query interfaces. There is an enormous interest in making the data in these sources easily accessible. There are primarily two general approaches to achieve this objective. The first is to surface the contents of these sources from the deep Web and add the contents to the index of regular search engines. The second is to integrate the searching capabilities of these sources and support integrated access to them. In this book, we introduce the state-of-the-art techniques for extracting, understanding, and integrating the query interfaces of deep Web data sources. These techniques are critical for producing an integrated query interface for each domain. The interface serves as the mediator for searching all data sources in the concerned domain. While query interface integration is only relevant for the deep Web integration approach, the extraction and understanding of query interfaces are critical for both deep Web exploration approaches. This book aims to provide in-depth and comprehensive coverage of the key technologies needed to create high quality integrated query interfaces automatically. The following technical issues are discussed in detail in this book: query interface modeling, query interface extraction, query interface clustering, query interface matching, query interface attribute integration, and query interface integration. Table of Contents: Introduction / Query Interface Representation and Extraction / Query Interface Clustering and Categorization / Query Interface Matching / Query Interface Attribute Integration / Query Interface Integration / Summary and Future Research
Detecting Fake News on Social Media
In the past decade, social media has become increasingly popular for news consumption due to its easy access, fast dissemination, and low cost. However, social media also enables the wide propagation of "fake news," i.e., news with intentionally false information. Fake news on social media can have significant negative societal effects. Therefore, fake news detection on social media has recently become an emerging research area that is attracting tremendous attention. This book, from a data mining perspective, introduces the basic concepts and characteristics of fake news across disciplines, reviews representative fake news detection methods in a principled way, and illustrates challenging issues of fake news detection on social media. In particular, we discussed the value of news content and social context, and important extensions to handle early detection, weakly-supervised detection, and explainable detection. The concepts, algorithms, and methods described in this lecture can help harness the power of social media to build effective and intelligent fake news detection systems. This book is an accessible introduction to the study of detecting fake news on social media. It is an essential reading for students, researchers, and practitioners to understand, manage, and excel in this area. This book is supported by additional materials, including lecture slides, the complete set of figures, key references, datasets, tools used in this book, and the source code of representative algorithms. The readers are encouraged to visit the book website for the latest information: http: //dmml.asu.edu/dfn/
Big Data Integration
The big data era is upon us: data are being generated, analyzed, and used at an unprecedented scale, and data-driven decision making is sweeping through all aspects of society. Since the value of data explodes when it can be linked and fused with other data, addressing the big data integration (BDI) challenge is critical to realizing the promise of big data. BDI differs from traditional data integration along the dimensions of volume, velocity, variety, and veracity. First, not only can data sources contain a huge volume of data, but also the number of data sources is now in the millions. Second, because of the rate at which newly collected data are made available, many of the data sources are very dynamic, and the number of data sources is also rapidly exploding. Third, data sources are extremely heterogeneous in their structure and content, exhibiting considerable variety even for substantially similar entities. Fourth, the data sources are of widely differing qualities, with significant differences in the coverage, accuracy and timeliness of data provided. This book explores the progress that has been made by the data integration community on the topics of schema alignment, record linkage and data fusion in addressing these novel challenges faced by big data integration. Each of these topics is covered in a systematic way: first starting with a quick tour of the topic in the context of traditional data integration, followed by a detailed, example-driven exposition of recent innovative techniques that have been proposed to address the BDI challenges of volume, velocity, variety, and veracity. Finally, it presents merging topics and opportunities that are specific to BDI, identifying promising directions for the data integration community.
On Uncertain Graphs
Large-scale, highly interconnected networks, which are often modeled as graphs, pervade both our society and the natural world around us. Uncertainty, on the other hand, is inherent in the underlying data due to a variety of reasons, such as noisy measurements, lack of precise information needs, inference and prediction models, or explicit manipulation, e.g., for privacy purposes. Therefore, uncertain, or probabilistic, graphs are increasingly used to represent noisy linked data in many emerging application scenarios, and they have recently become a hot topic in the database and data mining communities. Many classical algorithms such as reachability and shortest path queries become #P-complete and, thus, more expensive over uncertain graphs. Moreover, various complex queries and analytics are also emerging over uncertain networks, such as pattern matching, information diffusion, and influence maximization queries. In this book, we discuss the sources of uncertain graphs and their applications, uncertainty modeling, as well as the complexities and algorithmic advances on uncertain graphs processing in the context of both classical and emerging graph queries and analytics. We emphasize the current challenges and highlight some future research directions.
Transaction Processing on Modern Hardware
The last decade has brought groundbreaking developments in transaction processing. This resurgence of an otherwise mature research area has spurred from the diminishing cost per GB of DRAM that allows many transaction processing workloads to be entirely memory-resident. This shift demanded a pause to fundamentally rethink the architecture of database systems. The data storage lexicon has now expanded beyond spinning disks and RAID levels to include the cache hierarchy, memory consistency models, cache coherence and write invalidation costs, NUMA regions, and coherence domains. New memory technologies promise fast non-volatile storage and expose unchartered trade-offs for transactional durability, such as exploiting byte-addressable hot and cold storage through persistent programming that promotes simpler recovery protocols. In the meantime, the plateauing single-threaded processor performance has brought massive concurrency within a single node, first in the form of multi-core, andnow with many-core and heterogeneous processors. The exciting possibility to reshape the storage, transaction, logging, and recovery layers of next-generation systems on emerging hardware have prompted the database research community to vigorously debate the trade-offs between specialized kernels that narrowly focus on transaction processing performance vs. designs that permit transactionally consistent data accesses from decision support and analytical workloads. In this book, we aim to classify and distill the new body of work on transaction processing that has surfaced in the last decade to navigate researchers and practitioners through this intricate research subject.
Skylines and Other Dominance-Based Queries
This book is a gentle introduction to dominance-based query processing techniques and their applications. The book aims to present fundamental as well as some advanced issues in the area in a precise, but easy-to-follow, manner. Dominance is an intuitive concept that can be used in many different ways in diverse application domains. The concept of dominance is based on the values of the attributes of each object. An object ���� dominates another object ���� if ���� is better than ����. This goodness criterion may differ from one user to another. However, all decisions boil down to the minimization or maximization of attribute values. In this book, we will explore algorithms and applications related to dominance-based query processing. The concept of dominance has a long history in finance and multi-criteria optimization. However, the introduction of the concept to the database community in 2001 inspired many researchers to contribute to the area. Therefore, many algorithmic techniqueshave been proposed for the efficient processing of dominance-based queries, such as skyline queries, ����-dominant queries, and top-���� dominating queries, just to name a few.
Exploiting the Power of Group Differences
This book presents pattern-based problem-solving methods for a variety of machine learning and data analysis problems. The methods are all based on techniques that exploit the power of group differences. They make use of group differences represented using emerging patterns (aka contrast patterns), which are patterns that match significantly different numbers of instances in different data groups. A large number of applications outside of the computing discipline are also included. Emerging patterns (EPs) are useful in many ways. EPs can be used as features, as simple classifiers, as subpopulation signatures/characterizations, and as triggering conditions for alerts. EPs can be used in gene ranking for complex diseases since they capture multi-factor interactions. The length of EPs can be used to detect anomalies, outliers, and novelties. Emerging/contrast pattern based methods for clustering analysis and outlier detection do not need distance metrics, avoiding pitfalls of the latter in exploratory analysis of high dimensional data. EP-based classifiers can achieve good accuracy even when the training datasets are tiny, making them useful for exploratory compound selection in drug design. EPs can serve as opportunities in opportunity-focused boosting and are useful for constructing powerful conditional ensembles. EP-based methods often produce interpretable models and results. In general, EPs are useful for classification, clustering, outlier detection, gene ranking for complex diseases, prediction model analysis and improvement, and so on. EPs are useful for many tasks because they represent group differences, which have extraordinary power. Moreover, EPs represent multi-factor interactions, whose effective handling is of vital importance and is a major challenge in many disciplines. Based on the results presented in this book, one can clearly say that patterns are useful, especially when they are linked to issues of interest. We believe that many effective ways to exploit group differences' power still remain to be discovered. Hopefully this book will inspire readers to discover such new ways, besides showing them existing ways, to solve various challenging problems.
Individual and Collective Graph Mining
Graphs naturally represent information ranging from links between web pages, to communication in email networks, to connections between neurons in our brains. These graphs often span billions of nodes and interactions between them. Within this deluge of interconnected data, how can we find the most important structures and summarize them? How can we efficiently visualize them? How can we detect anomalies that indicate critical events, such as an attack on a computer system, disease formation in the human brain, or the fall of a company? This book presents scalable, principled discovery algorithms that combine globality with locality to make sense of one or more graphs. In addition to fast algorithmic methodologies, we also contribute graph-theoretical ideas and models, and real-world applications in two main areas: Individual Graph Mining: We show how to interpretably summarize a single graph by identifying its important graph structures. We complement summarization with inference, which leverages information about few entities (obtained via summarization or other methods) and the network structure to efficiently and effectively learn information about the unknown entities. Collective Graph Mining: We extend the idea of individual-graph summarization to time-evolving graphs, and show how to scalably discover temporal patterns. Apart from summarization, we claim that graph similarity is often the underlying problem in a host of applications where multiple graphs occur (e.g., temporal anomaly detection, discovery of behavioral patterns), and we present principled, scalable algorithms for aligning networks and measuring their similarity. The methods that we present in this book leverage techniques from diverse areas, such as matrix algebra, graph theory, optimization, information theory, machine learning, finance, and social science, to solve real-world problems. We present applications of our exploration algorithms to massive datasets, including a Web graph of 6.6 billion edges, a Twitter graph of 1.8 billion edges, brain graphs with up to 90 million edges, collaboration, peer-to-peer networks, browser logs, all spanning millions of users and interactions.
On Transactional Concurrency Control
This book contains a number of chapters on transactional database concurrency control. This volume's entire sequence of chapters can summarized as follows: A two-sentence summary of the volume's entire sequence of chapters is this: traditional locking techniques can be improved in multiple dimensions, notably in lock scopes (sizes), lock modes (increment, decrement, and more), lock durations (late acquisition, early release), and lock acquisition sequence (to avoid deadlocks). Even if some of these improvements can be transferred to optimistic concurrency control, notably a fine granularity of concurrency control with serializable transaction isolation including phantom protection, pessimistic concurrency control is categorically superior to optimistic concurrency control, i.e., independent of application, workload, deployment, hardware, and software implementation.
Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling
This book contains the refereed proceedings of two long-running events held along with the CAiSE conference relating to the areas of enterprise, business-process and information systems modeling: * the 23rd International Conference on Business Process Modeling, Development and Support, BPMDS 2022, and * the 27th International Conference on Exploring Modeling Methods for Systems Analysis and Development, EMMSAD 2022. The conferences were taking place in Leuven, Belgium during June 6-7, 2022. For BPMDS 7 full papers and 2 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected for publication from a total of 18 submissions; for EMMSAD 11 full papers and 3 short papers were accepted from 30 submissions after thorough reviews. The papers were organized in topical sections as follows: BPMDS: Actual and perceived challenges; business process modeling; understanding collaboration: one issue, many perspectives; and event logs - why it derivates; EMMSAD: Foundations of modeling and method engineering; enterprise, business process, and capability modeling; information systems and requirements modeling; domain-specific and knowledge modeling; and evaluation of modeling approaches.
Group Decision and Negotiation: Methodological and Practical Issues
Advanced Information Systems Engineering Workshops
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the international workshops associated with the 34th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, CAiSE 2022, which was held in Leuven, Belgium, during June 6-10, 2022.The workshops included in this volume are: - BC4IS: Second International Workshop on Blockchain for Information Systems- ISESL: Second International Workshop on Information Systems Engineering for Smarter Life- KET4DF: 4th International Workshop on Key Enabling Technology for Digital Factories They reflect a broad range of topics and trends ranging from blockchain technologies via digital factories, ethics, and ontologies, to the agile methods for business and information systems. The 11 full papers and 1 short paper presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 23 submissions.
Hands-On Financial Modeling with Excel for Microsoft 365 - Second Edition
Explore a variety of Excel features, functions, and productivity tips for various aspects of financial modelingKey FeaturesExplore Excel's financial functions and pivot tables with this updated second editionBuild an integrated financial model with Excel for Microsoft 365 from scratchPerform financial analysis with the help of real-world use casesBook DescriptionFinancial modeling is a core skill required by anyone who wants to build a career in finance. Hands-On Financial Modeling with Excel for Microsoft 365 explores financial modeling terminologies with the help of Excel.Starting with the key concepts of Excel, such as formulas and functions, this updated second edition will help you to learn all about referencing frameworks and other advanced components for building financial models. As you proceed, you'll explore the advantages of Power Query, learn how to prepare a 3-statement model, inspect your financial projects, build assumptions, and analyze historical data to develop data-driven models and functional growth drivers. Next, you'll learn how to deal with iterations and provide graphical representations of ratios, before covering best practices for effective model testing. Later, you'll discover how to build a model to extract a statement of comprehensive income and financial position, and understand capital budgeting with the help of end-to-end case studies.By the end of this financial modeling Excel book, you'll have examined data from various use cases and have developed the skills you need to build financial models to extract the information required to make informed business decisions.What you will learnIdentify the growth drivers derived from processing historical data in ExcelUse discounted cash flow (DCF) for efficient investment analysisPrepare detailed asset and debt schedule models in ExcelCalculate profitability ratios using various profit parametersObtain and transform data using Power QueryDive into capital budgeting techniquesApply a Monte Carlo simulation to derive key assumptions for your financial modelBuild a financial model by projecting balance sheets and profit and lossWho this book is forThis book is for data professionals, analysts, traders, business owners, and students who want to develop and implement in-demand financial modeling skills in their finance, analysis, trading, and valuation work. Even if you don't have any experience in data and statistics, this book will help you get started with building financial models. Working knowledge of Excel is a prerequisite.Table of ContentsAn Introduction to Financial Modeling and ExcelSteps for Building a Financial ModelFormulas and Functions - Completing Modeling Tasks with a Single FormulaThe Referencing Framework in ExcelAn Introduction to Power QueryUnderstanding Project and Building AssumptionsAsset and Debt SchedulesPreparing a Cash Flow StatementRatio AnalysisValuationModel Testing for Reasonableness and AccuracyCase Study 1 - Building a Model to Extract a Balance Sheet and Profit and Loss from a Trial BalanceCase Study 2 - Creating a Model for Capital Budgeting
Ethics of Data and Analytics
The ethics of data and analytics, in many ways, is no different than any endeavor to find the "right" answer. When a business chooses a supplier, funds a new product, or hires an employee, managers are making decisions with moral implications. The decisions in business, like all decisions, have a moral component in that people can benefit or be harmed, rules are followed or broken, people are treated fairly or not, and rights are enabled or diminished. However, data analytics introduces wrinkles or moral hurdles in how to think about ethics. Questions of accountability, privacy, surveillance, bias, and power stretch standard tools to examine whether a decision is good, ethical, or just. Dealing with these questions requires different frameworks to understand what is wrong and what could be better. Ethics of Data and Analytics: Concepts and Cases does not search for a new, different answer or to ban all technology in favor of human decision-making. The text takes a more skeptical, ironic approach to current answers and concepts while identifying and having solidarity with others. Applying this to the endeavor to understand the ethics of data and analytics, the text emphasizes finding multiple ethical approaches as ways to engage with current problems to find better solutions rather than prioritizing one set of concepts or theories. The book works through cases to understand those marginalized by data analytics programs as well as those empowered by them. Three themes run throughout the book. First, data analytics programs are value-laden in that technologies create moral consequences, reinforce or undercut ethical principles, and enable or diminish rights and dignity. This places an additional focus on the role of developers in their incorporation of values in the design of data analytics programs. Second, design is critical. In the majority of the cases examined, the purpose is to improve the design and development of data analytics programs. Third, data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are about power. The discussion of power-who has it, who gets to keep it, and who is marginalized-weaves throughout the chapters, theories, and cases. In discussing ethical frameworks, the text focuses on critical theories that question power structures and default assumptions and seek to emancipate the marginalized.
The Mathematics of Finite Networks
Since the early eighteenth century, the theory of networks and graphs has matured into an indispensable tool for describing countless real-world phenomena. However, the study of large-scale features of a network often requires unrealistic limits, such as taking the network size to infinity or assuming a continuum. These asymptotic and analytic approaches can significantly diverge from real or simulated networks when applied at the finite scales of real-world applications. This book offers an approach to overcoming these limitations by introducing operator graph theory, an exact, non-asymptotic set of tools combining graph theory with operator calculus. The book is intended for mathematicians, physicists, and other scientists interested in discrete finite systems and their graph-theoretical description, and in delineating the abstract algebraic structures that characterise such systems. All the necessary background on graph theory and operator calculus is included for readers to understand the potential applications of operator graph theory.
SAP S/4hana Central Finance and Group Reporting
Put together a centralised repository for all financial information and alter it as you see fitKey FeaturesExpert-led approach to implementing S/4 Central Finance in a wide range of companies.Solution-focused responses on Central Finance, Group reporting, BPC, and Fiori.Preparation guide for the certification exam and SAP S/4HANA Interview. DescriptionYour SAP S/4HANA journey has just begun. This book details several processes, methods, and expert strategies for integrating central finance into your IT systems, streamlining finance operations, data reporting, and master data preparation.With the help of this book, you'll learn all you need to know to get the most out of SAP S/4HANA Central Finance, SAP Group Reporting, BPC, Fiori, and other cutting-edge technologies. This book includes numerous examples to demonstrate the essentials of SAP S/4HANA Central Finance, SAP Group reporting, BPC, and Fiori. It offers extensive hands-on practice utilizing SAP S/4HANA standards to demonstrate Fiori, BPC, SAP S/4HANA Central Finance, and Group reporting. The book contains many applications and projects from throughout the industry spectrum. Interviewing for a job and passing the SAP Certification exam can be made easier with the help of this book!After reading this book you will be able to perform SAP S/4HANA Central Finance and SAP Group reporting operations. You can also define complex activities in SAP S/4HANA.What you will learnConduct the implementation of Central Finance in your IT environment.Consolidate your SAP S/4HANA system's finances.Carry out currency conversion, intercompany elimination, financial closure, and reporting.Perform a BPC Evaluation.Carry out SAP S/4HANA Central Finance and Group reporting functions.Utilize Fiori applications to perform SAP S/4HANA operations.Who this book is forThis book is a must for SAP consultants, architects, and project managers who wish to become proficient in the SAP S/4HANA project life cycle phases.Table of Contents1. Key success factors for adopting S/4 Central Finance in any organization2. Pragmatic approach - BPC, Fiori, S/4 Central Finance and SAP Group reporting3. Interview questions and answers on BPC, Central Finance and Group reportingRead more
Smart Technologies for Precision Assembly
This open access book constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of the 9th IFIP WG 5.5 International Precision Assembly Seminar, IPAS 2020, held virtually in December 2020.The 16 revised full papers and 10 revised short papers presented together with 1 keynote paper were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers address topics such as assembly design and planning; assembly operations; assembly cells and systems; human centred assembly; and assistance methods in assembly.
Building Data Science Solutions with Anaconda
The missing manual to becoming a successful data scientist-develop the skills to use key tools and the knowledge to thrive in the AI/ML landscapeKey Features: Learn from an AI patent-holding engineering manager with deep experience in Anaconda tools and OSSGet to grips with critical aspects of data science such as bias in datasets and interpretability of modelsGain a deeper understanding of the AI/ML landscape through real-world examples and practical analogiesBook Description: You might already know that there's a wealth of data science and machine learning resources available on the market, but what you might not know is how much is left out by most of these AI resources. This book not only covers everything you need to know about algorithm families but also ensures that you become an expert in everything, from the critical aspects of avoiding bias in data to model interpretability, which have now become must-have skills.In this book, you'll learn how using Anaconda as the easy button, can give you a complete view of the capabilities of tools such as conda, which includes how to specify new channels to pull in any package you want as well as discovering new open source tools at your disposal. You'll also get a clear picture of how to evaluate which model to train and identify when they have become unusable due to drift. Finally, you'll learn about the powerful yet simple techniques that you can use to explain how your model works.By the end of this book, you'll feel confident using conda and Anaconda Navigator to manage dependencies and gain a thorough understanding of the end-to-end data science workflow.What You Will Learn: Install packages and create virtual environments using condaUnderstand the landscape of open source software and assess new toolsUse scikit-learn to train and evaluate model approachesDetect bias types in your data and what you can do to prevent itGrow your skillset with tools such as NumPy, pandas, and Jupyter NotebooksSolve common dataset issues, such as imbalanced and missing dataUse LIME and SHAP to interpret and explain black-box modelsWho this book is for: If you're a data analyst or data science professional looking to make the most of Anaconda's capabilities and deepen your understanding of data science workflows, then this book is for you. You don't need any prior experience with Anaconda, but a working knowledge of Python and data science basics is a must.
The Tableau Workshop
Learn how to bring your data to life with this hands-on guide to visual analytics with TableauKey Features: Master the fundamentals of Tableau Desktop and Tableau PrepLearn how to explore, analyze, and present data to provide business insightsBuild your experience and confidence with hands-on exercises and activitiesBook Description: Learning Tableau has never been easier, thanks to this practical introduction to storytelling with data. The Tableau Workshop breaks down the analytical process into five steps: data preparation, data exploration, data analysis, interactivity, and distribution of dashboards. Each stage is addressed with a clear walkthrough of the key tools and techniques you'll need, as well as engaging real-world examples, meaningful data, and practical exercises to give you valuable hands-on experience.As you work through the book, you'll learn Tableau step by step, studying how to clean, shape, and combine data, as well as how to choose the most suitable charts for any given scenario. You'll load data from various sources and formats, perform data engineering to create new data that delivers deeper insights, and create interactive dashboards that engage end-users.All concepts are introduced with clear, simple explanations and demonstrated through realistic example scenarios. You'll simulate real-world data science projects with use cases such as traffic violations, urban populations, coffee store sales, and air travel delays.By the end of this Tableau book, you'll have the skills and knowledge to confidently present analytical results and make data-driven decisions.What You Will Learn: Become an effective user of Tableau Prep and Tableau DesktopLoad, combine, and process data for analysis and visualizationUnderstand different types of charts and when to use themPerform calculations to engineer new data and unlock hidden insightsAdd interactivity to your visualizations to make them more engagingCreate holistic dashboards that are detailed and user-friendlyWho this book is for: This book is for anyone who wants to get started on visual analytics with Tableau. If you're new to Tableau, this Workshop will get you up and running. If you already have some experience in Tableau, this book will help fill in any gaps, consolidate your understanding, and give you extra practice of key tools.
Build Talking Apps for Alexa
Voice recognition is here at last. Alexa and other voice assistants have now become widespread and mainstream. Is your app ready for voice interaction? Learn how to develop your own voice applications for Amazon Alexa. Start with techniques for building conversational user interfaces and dialog management. Integrate with existing applications and visual interfaces to complement voice-first applications. The future of human-computer interaction is voice, and we'll help you get ready for it. For decades, voice-enabled computers have only existed in the realm of science fiction. But now the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) lets you develop your own voice-first applications. Leverage ASK to create engaging and natural user interfaces for your applications, enabling them to listen to users and talk back. You'll see how to use voice and sound as first-class components of user-interface design. We'll start with the essentials of building Alexa voice applications, called skills, including useful tools for creating, testing, and deploying your skills. From there, you can define parameters and dialogs that will prompt users for input in a natural, conversational style. Integrate your Alexa skills with Amazon services and other backend services to create a custom user experience. Discover how to tailor Alexa's voice and language to create more engaging responses and speak in the user's own language. Complement the voice-first experience with visual interfaces for users on screen-based devices. Add options for users to buy upgrades or other products from your application. Once all the pieces are in place, learn how to publish your Alexa skill for everyone to use. Create the future of user interfaces using the Alexa Skills Kit today. What You Need: You will need a computer capable of running the latest version of Node.js, a Git client, and internet access.
Pandas in 7 Days
Make data analysis fast, reliable, and clean with Python, Pandas and Matplotlib.Key FeaturesA detailed walk-through of the Pandas library's features with multiple examples.Numerous graphical representations and reporting capabilities using popular Matplotlib.A high-level overview of extracting data from including files, databases, and the web.DescriptionNo matter how large or small your dataset is, the author 'Fabio Nelli' simply used this book to teach all the finest technical coaching on applying Pandas to conduct data analysis with zero worries.Both newcomers and seasoned professionals will benefit from this book. It teaches you how to use the pandas library in just one week. Every day of the week, you'll learn and practise the features and data analysis exercises listed below: Day 01: Get familiar with the fundamental data structures of pandas, including Declaration, data upload, indexing, and so on.Day 02: Execute commands and operations related to data selection and extraction, including slicing, sorting, masking, iteration, and query execution.Day 03: Advanced commands and operations such as grouping, multi-indexing, reshaping, cross-tabulations, and aggregations.Day 04: Working with several data frames, including comparison, joins, concatenation, and merges.Day 05: Cleaning, pre-processing, and numerous strategies for data extraction from external files, the web, databases, and other data sources.Day 06: Working with missing data, interpolation, duplicate labels, boolean data types, text data, and time-series datasets.Day 07: Introduction to Jupyter Notebooks, interactive data analysis, and analytical reporting with Matplotlib's stunning graphics.What you will learnExtract, cleanse, and process data from databases, text files, HTML pages, and JSON data.Work with DataFrames and Series, and apply functions to scale data manipulations.Graph your findings using charts typically used in modern business analytics.Learn to use all of the pandas basic and advanced features independently. Storing and manipulating labeled/columnar data efficiently.Who this book is forIf you're looking to expedite a data science or sophisticated data analysis project, you've come to the perfect place. Each data analysis topic is covered step-by-step with real-world examples. Python knowledge isn't required however, knowing a little bit helpsTable of Contents1. Pandas, the Python library2. Setting up a Data Analysis Environment3. Day 1 - Data Structures in Pandas library4. Day 2 - Working within a DataFrame, Basic Functionalities5. Day 3 - Working within a DataFrame, Advanced Functionalities6. Day 4 - Working with two or more DataFrames7. Day 5 - Working with data sources and real-word datasets8. Day 6 - Troubleshooting Challenges wit Real Datasets9. Day 7 - Data Visualization and Reporting10. Conclusion Moving BeyondRead mor
Mathematical Pictures at a Data Science Exhibition
This text provides deep and comprehensive coverage of the mathematical background for data science, including machine learning, optimal recovery, compressed sensing, optimization, and neural networks. In the past few decades, heuristic methods adopted by big tech companies have complemented existing scientific disciplines to form the new field of Data Science. This text embarks the readers on an engaging itinerary through the theory supporting the field. Altogether, twenty-seven lecture-length chapters with exercises provide all the details necessary for a solid understanding of key topics in data science. While the book covers standard material on machine learning and optimization, it also includes distinctive presentations of topics such as reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces, spectral clustering, optimal recovery, compressed sensing, group testing, and applications of semidefinite programming. Students and data scientists with less mathematical background will appreciate the appendices that provide more background on some of the more abstract concepts.
Natural Language Processing with Flair
Learn how to solve practical NLP problems with the Flair Python framework, train sequence labeling models, work with text classifiers and word embeddings, and much more through hands-on practical exercisesKey Features: Backed by the community and written by an NLP expertGet an understanding of basic NLP problems and terminologySolve real-world NLP problems with Flair with the help of practical hands-on exercisesBook Description: Flair is an easy-to-understand natural language processing (NLP) framework designed to facilitate training and distribution of state-of-the-art NLP models for named entity recognition, part-of-speech tagging, and text classification. Flair is also a text embedding library for combining different types of embeddings, such as document embeddings, Transformer embeddings, and the proposed Flair embeddings.Natural Language Processing with Flair takes a hands-on approach to explaining and solving real-world NLP problems. You'll begin by installing Flair and learning about the basic NLP concepts and terminology. You will explore Flair's extensive features, such as sequence tagging, text classification, and word embeddings, through practical exercises. As you advance, you will train your own sequence labeling and text classification models and learn how to use hyperparameter tuning in order to choose the right training parameters. You will learn about the idea behind one-shot and few-shot learning through a novel text classification technique TARS. Finally, you will solve several real-world NLP problems through hands-on exercises, as well as learn how to deploy Flair models to production.By the end of this Flair book, you'll have developed a thorough understanding of typical NLP problems and you'll be able to solve them with Flair.What You Will Learn: Gain an understanding of core NLP terminology and conceptsGet to grips with the capabilities of the Flair NLP frameworkFind out how to use Flair's state-of-the-art pre-built modelsBuild custom sequence labeling models, embeddings, and classifiersLearn about a novel text classification technique called TARSDiscover how to build applications with Flair and how to deploy them to productionWho this book is for: This Flair NLP book is for anyone who wants to learn about NLP through one of the most beginner-friendly, yet powerful Python NLP libraries out there. Software engineering students, developers, data scientists, and anyone who is transitioning into NLP and is interested in learning about practical approaches to solving problems with Flair will find this book useful. The book, however, is not recommended for readers aiming to get an in-depth theoretical understanding of the mathematics behind NLP. Beginner-level knowledge of Python programming is required to get the most out of this book.
Mathematical Pictures at a Data Science Exhibition
This text provides deep and comprehensive coverage of the mathematical background for data science, including machine learning, optimal recovery, compressed sensing, optimization, and neural networks. In the past few decades, heuristic methods adopted by big tech companies have complemented existing scientific disciplines to form the new field of Data Science. This text embarks the readers on an engaging itinerary through the theory supporting the field. Altogether, twenty-seven lecture-length chapters with exercises provide all the details necessary for a solid understanding of key topics in data science. While the book covers standard material on machine learning and optimization, it also includes distinctive presentations of topics such as reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces, spectral clustering, optimal recovery, compressed sensing, group testing, and applications of semidefinite programming. Students and data scientists with less mathematical background will appreciate the appendices that provide more background on some of the more abstract concepts.
Big Data Analytics
Big Data Analytics: Digital Marketing and Decision-Making covers the advances related to marketing and business analytics. Investment marketing analytics can create value through proper allocation of resources and resource orchestration processes. The use of data analytics tools can be used to improve and speed decision-making processes.Chapters examining analytics for decision-making cover such topics as: Big data analytics for gathering business intelligence Data analytics and consumer behavior The role of big data analytics in organizational decision-making This book also looks at digital marketing and focuses on such areas as: The prediction of marketing by consumer analytics Web analytics for digital marketing Smart retailing Leveraging web analytics for optimizing digital marketing strategies Big Data Analytics: Digital Marketing and Decision-Making aims to help organizations increase their profits by making better decisions on time through the use of data analytics. It is written for students, practitioners, industry professionals, researchers, and faculty working in the field of commerce and marketing, big data analytics, and organizational decision-making.
Data Analytics Initiatives
The categorisation of analytical projects could help to simplify complexity reasonably and, at the same time, clarify the critical aspects of analytical initiatives. But how can this complex work be categorized? What makes it so complex?Data Analytics Initiatives: Managing Analytics for Success emphasizes that each analytics project is different. At the same time, analytics projects have many common aspects, and these features make them unique compared to other projects. Describing these commonalities helps to develop a conceptual understanding of analytical work. However, features specific to each initiative affects the entire analytics project lifecycle. Neglecting them by trying to use general approaches without tailoring them to each project can lead to failure.In addition to examining typical characteristics of the analytics project and how to categorise them, the book looks at specific types of projects, provides a high-level assessment of their characteristics from a risk perspective, and comments on the most common problems or challenges. The book also presents examples of questions that could be asked of relevant people to analyse an analytics project. These questions help to position properly the project and to find commonalities and general project challenges.
