Prospectus

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Seminar Distributed Data Mining

Course
2019-2020

Admission requirements

Not applicable.

Description

In recent years we witness a rapidly growing gap between the amount of collected data and data processing capabilities of conventional computers. This is not surprising: according to the Moore’s Law, the processing power of an “average computer” doubles every 18 months, while, according to Lyman and Varian from Berkeley, the amount of stored data doubles every 12 months. In addition to this growing gap, there is an increasing need to analyze the data more quickly, more precisely, and more “intelligently”. In addition to the traditional data mining tasks: classification, regression and clustering, some new challenges emerged, which require completely new algorithms for:

  • analysis of big networks: web pages, social networks (Facebook, Twitter), traffic, financial networks

  • recommender systems: Amazon, Netflix

  • digital forensics: analysis of data related to cybercrime

  • analysis of large text corpora (Wikipedia, Github, Twitter)

  • scientific data mining (bioinformatics, astronomy, physics)

  • analysis of sensor data

In order to cope with this overwhelming data flow, several frameworks for distributed data mining, together with specialized data mining algorithms, have been invented, e.g., Hadoop and MapReduce, Spark, DASK. During the seminar students (organized in small teams) will work on some challenging data mining problems (selected by themselves), performing experiments on multi-core computers (from our Data Science Lab) or cluster computers (DAS4 or DAS5) and reporting on their problems, approaches, results during weekly meetings. Each team will have to summarize their work in a final report.

Course objectives

During the seminar, students will:

  • gain detailed knowledge of some modern tools used in distributed data mining

  • gain some hands-on experience with mining big data sets on distributed platforms

  • learn to work together is small research teams

  • identify some promising research directions

Timetable

The most recent timetable can be found at the students' website.

Mode of instruction

  • Weekly online presentations and discussions

  • An experimental research project

Course load

Total hours of study: 168 hrs.(= 6 EC)
Attending the meetings: 26 hrs.
Practical work: 96 hrs.
Reporting: 32 hrs.
Presentations: 14 hrs.

Assessment method

The grade will be based on 3 components:

  • presentations (30%)

  • software developed during the seminar (30%)

  • final report (40%)

Blackboard

See Blackboard

Reading list

  • A. Rajaraman, J. Leskovec, and J. Ullman, Mining of Massive Datasets

  • Additional materials (articles, links, data sets, ...) will be distributed during the first meeting.

Registration

  • You have to sign up for courses and exams (including retakes) in uSis. Check this link for information about how to register for courses.

  • Please also register for the course in Blackboard.

Contact information

Lecturer: dr. Wojtek Kowalczyk
Skype for Business: kowalczykwj@vuw.leidenuniv.nl