Web Data Mining: Exploring Hyperlinks, Contents, and Usage Data
Web mining aims to discover useful information and knowledge from Web hyperlinks, page contents, and usage data. Although Web mining uses many conventional data mining techniques, it is not purely an application of traditional data mining due to the semi-structured and unstructured nature of the Web data. The field has also developed many of its own algorithms and techniques. Liu has written a comprehensive text on Web mining, which consists of two parts. The first part covers the data mining and machine learning foundations, where all the essential concepts and algorithms of data mining and machine learning are presented. The second part covers the key topics of Web mining, where Web crawling, search, social network analysis, structured data extraction, information integration, opinion mining and sentiment analysis, Web usage mining, query log mining, computational advertising, and recommender systems are all treated both in breadth and in depth. His book thus brings all the related concepts and algorithms together to form an authoritative and coherent text.The book offers a rich blend of theory and practice. It is suitable for students, researchers and practitioners interested in Web mining and data mining both as a learning text and as a reference book. Professors can readily use it for classes on data mining, Web mining, and text mining. Additional teaching materials such as lecture slides, datasets, and implemented algorithms are available online.

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: 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: 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: Robot Obstacle Avoidance based on an Improved Ant Colony Algorithm
abstract: Obstacle Avoidance for mobile robot is a nondeterministic polynomial hard (NP-hard) problem. Ant algorithm is the bionic algorithm which simulated ants foraging behavior, which can effectively solve the problems of this kind. In this paper, we propose an improved ant colony algorithm for robot obstacle avoidance, in which heuristic information is adjusted at run-time during the searching process. The proposed algorithm can effectively alleviate the local optimum problem, global optimal path can be robustly found in our experiments.

title: Non-linear Correlation Techniques in Educational Data Mining
abstract: There is such an increasing interest in data mining and educational systems currently that has made educational data mining as a new growing research community. This paper explores how to develope new methods for discovering knowledge of data from educational context. The non-linear correlation technology was introduced and applied in the mining process in the whole knowledge achieved. Meanwhile, we have applied these methods in the real course management datasets and found correspondent results for the educators.

title: WBEM Based Distributed Network Monitoring
abstract: In the paper we identify the needs in efficient management of distributed networks and some problematic areas in the field. Then we introduce Web Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) to address the problem of providing a unified way to model all kinds of managed elements in a single information model in heterogeneous network environments. The advantages brought about by the use of WBEM in network management solve some critical problems existing in current network management. Based on the brief description of components of WBEM, we discuss in depth the basic WBEM instrumentation and multi-tiered WBEM enabled management infrastructure. We also apply this multi-tiered management infrastructure to a network management application scenario to monitor network activities for unexpected behaviors.

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: Analog circuit optimization system based on hybrid evolutionary algorithms
abstract: This paper investigates a hybrid evolutionary-based design system for automated sizing of analog integrated circuits (ICs). A new algorithm, called competitive co-evolutionary differential evolution (CODE), is proposed to design analog ICs with practical user-defined specifications. On the basis of the combination of HSPICE and MATLAB, the system links circuit performances, evaluated through electrical simulation, to the optimization system in the MATLAB environment, once a circuit topology is selected. The system has been tested by typical and hard-to-design cases, such as complex analog blocks with stringent design requirements. The results show that the design specifications are closely met, even in highly-constrained situations. Comparisons with available methods like genetic algorithms and differential evolution, which use static penalty functions to handle design constraints, have also been carried out, showing that the proposed algorithm offers important advantages in terms of optimization quality and robustness. Moreover, the algorithm is shown to be efficient.