Targeting the right students using data mining
education domain offers a fertile ground for many interesting and challenging data mining applications. These applications can help both educators and students, and improve the quality of education. In this paper, we present a real-life application for the Gifted Education Programme (GEP) of the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Singapore. The application involves many data mining tasks. This paper focuses only on one task, namely, selecting students for remedial classes. Traditionally, a cut-off mark for each subject is used to select the weak students. That is, those students whose scores in a subject fall below the cut-off mark for the subject are advised to take further classes in the subject. In this paper, we show that this traditional method requires too many students to take part in the remedial classes. This not only increases the teaching load of the teachers, but also gives unnecessary burdens to students, which is particularly undesirable in our case because the GEP students are generally taking more subjects than non-GEP students, and the GEP students are encouraged to have more time to explore advanced topics. With the help of data mining, we are able to select the targeted students much more precisely.

title: Opinion Mining
abstract: Описанл процедуру формування інтегрального показника об’єкта згідно з відгуками користувачів під час застосування методів оцінювання опінії текстової інформації у web-документах. Запропоновано використання лінгвістичних змінних та застосування вагових коефіцієнтів для достовірнішого результату оцінювання емоційного забарвлення текстової інформації. Ключові слова: опінія, емоційне забарвлення, об’єкт, інтегральний показник, лінгвістична змінна, ваговий коефіцієнт.

title: Speed-up iterative frequent itemset mining with constraint changes
abstract: Mining of frequent itemsets is a fundamental data mining task. Past research has proposed many efficient algorithms for this purpose. Recent work also highlighted the importance of using constraints to focus the mining process to mine only those relevant itemsets. In practice, data mining is often an interactive and iterative process. The user typically changes constraints and runs the mining algorithm many times before being satisfied with the final results. This interactive process is very time consuming. Existing mining algorithms are unable to take advantage of this iterative process to use previous mining results to speed up the current mining process. This results in an enormous waste of time and computation. In this paper, we propose an efficient technique to utilize previous mining results to improve the efficiency of current mining when constraints are changed. We first introduce the concept of tree boundary to summarize useful information available from previous mining. We then show that the tree boundary provides an effective and efficient framework for the new mining. The proposed technique has been implemented in the context of two existing frequent itemset mining algorithms, FP-tree and tree projection. Experiment results on both synthetic and real-life datasets show that the proposed approach achieves a dramatic saving of computation.

title: Finding Actionable Knowledge via Automated Comparison
abstract: The problem of finding interesting and actionable patterns is a major challenge in data mining. It has been studied by many data mining researchers. The issue is that data mining algorithms often generate too many patterns, which make it very hard for the user to find those truly useful ones. Over the years many techniques have been proposed. However, few have made it to real-life applications. At the end of 2005, we built a data mining system for Motorola (called Opportunity Map) to enable the user to explore the space of a large number of rules in order to find actionable knowledge. The approach is based on the concept of rule cubes and operations on rule cubes. A rule cube is similar to a data cube, but stores rules. Since its deployment, some issues have also been identified during the regular use of the system in Motorola. One of the key issues is that although the operations on rule cubes are flexible, each operation is primitive and has to be initiated by the user. Finding a piece of actionable knowledge typically involves many operations and intense visual inspections, which are labor-intensive and time-consuming. From interactions with our users, we identified a generic problem that is crucial for finding actionable knowledge. The problem involves extensive comparison of sub-populations and identification of the cause of their differences. This paper first defines the problem and then proposes an effective method to solve the problem automatically. To the best of our knowledge, there is no reported study of this problem. The new method has been added to the Opportunity Map system and is now in daily use in Motorola.

title: Entity discovery and assignment for opinion mining applications
abstract: Opinion mining became an important topic of study in recent years due to its wide range of applications. There are also many companies offering opinion mining services. One problem that has not been studied so far is the assignment of entities that have been talked about in each sentence. Let us use forum discussions about products as an example to make the problem concrete. In a typical discussion post, the author may give opinions on multiple products and also compare them. The issue is how to detect what products have been talked about in each sentence. If the sentence contains the product names, they need to be identified. We call this problem entity discovery. If the product names are not explicitly mentioned in the sentence but are implied due to the use of pronouns and language conventions, we need to infer the products. We call this problem entity assignment. These problems are important because without knowing what products each sentence talks about the opinion mined from the sentence is of little use. In this paper, we study these problems and propose two effective methods to solve the problems. Entity discovery is based on pattern discovery and entity assignment is based on mining of comparative sentences. Experimental results using a large number of forum posts demonstrate the effectiveness of the technique. Our system has also been successfully tested in a commercial setting.

title: Dealing with different distributions in learning from
abstract: In the problem of learning with positive and unlabeled examples, existing research all assumes that positive examples P and the hidden positive examples in the unlabeled set U are generated from the same distribution. This assumption may be violated in practice. In such cases, existing methods perform poorly. This paper proposes a novel technique A-EM to deal with the problem. Experimental results with product page classification demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.

title: Controllability of a Leader-Follower Dynamic Network with Interaction Time Delays
abstract: This paper studies the controllability of a leader-follower network of dynamic agents in the presence of communication delays. The network dynamics is governed by nearest neighbor rules over a fixed communication topology. The leader is a particular agent acting as an external input to steer the other member agents. We derive sufficient conditions of the controllability of the dynamic network and give an example to illustrate the main results.

title: SyD: A Middleware Testbed for Collaborative Applications over Small Heterogeneous Devices and Data Stores
abstract: Developing a collaborative application running on a collection of heterogeneous, possibly mobile, devices, each potentially hosting data stores, using existing middleware technologies such as JXTA, BREW, compact .NET and J2ME requires too many ad-hoc techniques as well as cumbersome and time-consuming programming. Our System on Mobile Devices (SyD) middleware, on the other hand, has a modular architecture that makes such application development very systematic and streamlined. The architecture supports transactions over mobile data stores, with a range of remote group invocation options and embedded interdependencies among such data store objects. The architecture further provides a persistent uniform object view, group transaction with Quality of Service (QoS) specifications, and XML vocabulary for inter-device communication. This paper presents the basic SyD concepts and introduces the architecture and the design of the SyD middleware and its components. We also provide guidelines for SyD application development and deployment process. We include the basic performance figures of SyD components and a few SyD applications on Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) platforms. We believe that SyD is the first comprehensive working prototype of its kind, with a small code footprint of 112 KB with 76 KB being device-resident, and has a good potential for incorporating many ideas for performance extensions, scalability, QoS, workflows and security.

title: Multi-agent System for Custom Relationship Management with SVMs Tool
abstract: Distributed data mining in the CRM is to learn available knowledge from the customer relationship so as to instruct the strategic behavior. In order to resolve the CRM in distributed data mining, this paper proposes the architecture of distributed data mining for CRM, and then utilizes the support vector machine tool to separate the customs into several classes and manage them. In the end, the practical experiments about one Chinese company are conducted to show the good performance of the proposed approach.

title: Multi-Agent Based Network Management Task Decomposition and Scheduling
abstract: The rapid development of Internet makes network management on large-scale network a critical issue. But with the management task of large-scale network becoming more complicated, neither centralized network management nor agent based network management can satisfy the increasing demands. This paper presents a network management framework to support dynamic scheduling decisions. In this framework, some algorithms are proposed to decompose the whole network management task into several groups of sub-tasks. During the course of decomposition, different priorities are assigned to sub-tasks. Then based on the priorities of these sub-tasks, the strategies of agent scheduling are established. Priority-ranked sub-tasks are grouped according to their inter-dependences. Sub-tasks with the same priority are put into the same group and they can be performed in parallel manner, while different groups of sub-tasks with different priorities must be implemented according to the order of their priorities. An experiment has been done with the algorithms, the results of which demonstrate the advantage of the algorithms.

title: Robust content-based image indexing using contextual clues and automatic pseudofeedback
abstract: In this paper we present a robust information integration approach to identifying images of persons in large collections such as the Web. The underlying system relies on combining content analysis, which involves face detection and recognition, with context analysis, which involves extraction of text or HTML features. Two aspects are explored to test the robustness of this approach: sensitivity of the retrieval performance to the context analysis parameters and automatic construction of a facial image database via automatic pseudofeedback. For the sensitivity testing, we reevaluate system performance while varying context analysis parameters. This is compared with a learning approach where association rules among textual feature values and image relevance are learned via the CN2 algorithm. A face database is constructed by clustering after an initial retrieval relying on face detection and context analysis alone. Experimental results indicate that the approach is robust for identifying and indexing person images.