In this paper, we consider the problem of how to represent the locations of Internet hosts in a Cartesian coordinate system to facilitate estimate of the network distance between two arbitrary Internet hosts. We envision an infrastructure that consists of beacon nodes and provides the service of estimating network distance between two hosts without direct delay measurement. We show that the principal component analysis (PCA) technique can e#ectively extract topological information from delay measurements between beacon hosts. Based on PCA, we devise a transformation method that projects the distance data space into a new coordinate system of (much) smaller dimensions. The transformation retains as much topological information as possible and yet enables end hosts to easily determine their locations in the coordinate system. The resulting new coordinate system is termed as the Internet Coordinate System (ICS). As compared to existing work (e.g., IDMaps [1] and GNP [2]), ICS incurs smaller computation overhead in calculating the coordinates of hosts and smaller measurement overhead (required for end hosts to measure their distances to beacon hosts). Finally, we show via experimentation with real-life data sets that ICS is robust and accurate, regardless of the number of beacon nodes (as long as it exceeds certain threshold) and the complexity of network topology.

When clustering a dataset, the right number k of clusters to use is often not obvious, and choosing k automatically is a hard algorithmic problem. In this paper we present an improved algorithm for learning k while clustering. The G-means algorithm is based on a statistical test for the hypothesis that a subset of data follows a Gaussian distribution. G-means runs k-means with increasing k in a hierarchical fashion until the test accepts the hypothesis that the data assigned to each k-means center are Gaussian. Two key advantages are that the hypothesis test does not limit the covariance of the data and does not compute a full covariance matrix. Additionally, G-means only requires one intuitive parameter, the standard statistical significance level α. We present results from experiments showing that the algorithm works well, and better than a recent method based on the BIC penalty for model complexity. In these experiments, we show that the BIC is ineffective as a scoring function, since it does

We consider the problem of variable or feature selection for model-based clustering. We recast the problem of comparing two nested subsets of variables as a model comparison problem, and address it using approximate Bayes factors. We develop a greedy search algorithm for finding a local optimum in model space. The resulting method selects variables (or features), the number of clusters, and the clustering model simultaneously. We applied the method to several simulated and real examples, and found that removing irrelevant variables often improved performance. Compared to methods based on all the variables, our variable selection method consistently yielded more accurate estimates of the number of clusters, and lower classification error rates, as well as more parsimonious clustering models and easier visualization of results.

We combine linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and K-means clustering into a coherent framework to adaptively select the most discriminative subspace. We use K-means clustering to generate class labels and use LDA to do subspace selection. The clustering process is thus integrated with the subspace selection process and the data are then simultaneously clustered while the feature subspaces are selected. We show the rich structure of the general LDA-Km framework by examining its variants and their relationships to earlier approaches. Extensive experimental results on real-world datasets show the effectiveness of our approach. 1.

Many high level representations of time series have been proposed for data mining, including Fourier transforms, wavelets, eigenwaves, piecewise polynomial models etc. Many researchers have also considered symbolic representations of time series, noting that such representations would potentiality allow researchers to avail of the wealth of data structures and algorithms from the text processing and bioinformatics communities. While many symbolic representations of time series have been introduced over the past decades, they all suffer from two fatal flaws. Firstly, the dimensionality of the symbolic representation is the same as the original data, and virtually all data mining algorithms scale poorly with dimensionality. Secondly, although distance measures can be defined on the symbolic approaches, these distance measures have little correlation with distance measures defined on the original time series. In this work we formulate a new symbolic representation of time series. Our representation is unique in that it allows dimensionality/numerosity reduction, and it also allows distance measures to be defined on the symbolic approach that lower bound corresponding distance measures defined on the original series. As we shall demonstrate, this latter feature is particularly exciting because it allows one to run certain data mining algorithms on the efficiently manipulated symbolic representation, while producing identical results to the algorithms that operate on the original data. In particular, we will demonstrate the utility of our

The emergence of the field of data mining in the last decade has sparked an increasing interest in clustering of tiate series. Although there has been much research on clustering in general, most classic machine learning and data mining algorithms do not work well for time series due to their unique structure. In particular, the high dimensionaliF, very high feature correlation, and the (typically) large amount of noise that characterize time series data present a difficult challenge. In this work we address these challenges by introducing a novel anytiate version of k-Means clustering algorithm for time series. The algorithm works by leveraging off the multi-resolution property of wavelets. In particular, an initial clustering is perforated with a very coarse resolution representation of the data. The results obtained from this "quick and dirty" clustering are used to initialize a clustering at a slightly finer level of approximation. This process is repeated until the clustering results stabilize or until the "approxiatation" is the raw data. In addition to casting k-Means as an anytime algorithm, our approach has two other very unintuitive properties. The quality of the clustering is often better than the batch algorithm, and even if the algorithm is run to coatpletion, the time taken is typically much less than the time taken by the original algorithm. We explain, and eatpirically demonstrate these surprising and desirable properties with coatprehensive experiatents on several publicly available real data sets.

We present a novel anytime version of partitional clustering algorithm, such as k-Means and EM, for time series. The algorithm works by leveraging off the multi-resolution property of wavelets. The dilemma of choosing the initial centers is mitigated by initializing the centers at each approximation level, using the final centers returned by the coarser representations. In addition to casting the clustering algorithms as anytime algorithms, this approach has two other very desirable properties. By working at lower dimensionalities we can efficiently avoid local minima. Therefore, the quality of the clustering is usually better than the batch algorithm. In addition, even if the algorithm is run to completion, our approach is much faster than its batch counterpart. We explain, and empirically demonstrate these surprising and desirable properties with comprehensive experiments on several publicly available real data sets. We further demonstrate that our approach can be generalized to a framework of much broader range of algorithms or data mining problems.

Typical clustering algorithms output a single clustering of the data. However, in real world applications, data can often be interpreted in many different ways; data can have different groupings that are reasonable and interesting from different perspectives. This is especially true for high-dimensional data, where different feature subspaces may reveal different structures of the data. Why commit to one clustering solution while all these alternative clustering views might be interesting to the user. In this paper, we propose a new clustering paradigm for explorative data analysis: find all non-redundant clustering views of the data, where data points of one cluster can belong to different clusters in other views. We present a framework to solve this problem and suggest two approaches within this framework: (1) orthogonal clustering, and (2) clustering in orthogonal subspaces. In essence, both approaches find alternative ways to partition the data by projecting it to a space that is orthogonal to our current solution. The first approach seeks orthogonality in the cluster space, while the second approach seeks orthogonality in the feature space. We test our framework on both synthetic and high-dimensional benchmark data sets, and the results show that indeed our approaches were able to discover varied solutions that are interesting and meaningful.

Protein-Protein Interaction (PPI) networks are believed to be important sources of information related to biological processes and complex metabolic functions of the cell. The presence of biologically relevant functional modules in these networks has been theorized by many researchers. However, the application of traditional clustering algorithms for extracting these modules has not been successful, largely due to the presence of noisy false positive interactions as well as specific topological challenges in the network. In this paper, we propose an ensemble clustering framework to address this problem. For base clustering, we introduce two topology-based distance metrics to counteract the effects of noise. We develop a PCA-based consensus clustering technique, designed to reduce the dimensionality of the consensus problem and yield informative clusters. We also develop a soft consensus clustering variant to assign multifaceted proteins to multiple functional groups. We conduct an empirical evaluation of different consensus techniques using topology-based, information theoretic and domain-specific validation metrics and show that our approaches can provide significant benefits over other state-of-theart approaches. Our analysis of the consensus clusters obtained demonstrates that ensemble clustering can a) produce improved biologically significant functional groupings; and b) facilitate soft clustering by discovering multiple functional associations for proteins. 1.

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