Small failures should only disrupt a small part of a network. One way to do this is by marking the surrounding area as untrustworthy --- circumscribing the failure. This can be done with a distributed algorithm using hierarchical clustering and neighbor relations, and the resulting circumscription is near-optimal for convex failures.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Florida, 2001. / Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains ix, 117 p.; also contains graphics. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 109-116).

The aim of the project was to identify biologically relevant novel gene clusters by using combined genomic data instead of using only gene expression data in isolation. The clustering algorithm based on self-organizing maps (Kasturi et al., 2005) was extended and implemented in order to use gene location data together with the gene expression and the motif occurrence data for gene clustering. A distance function was defined to be used with gene location data. The algorithm was also extended in order to use vector angle distance for gene expression data. Arabidopsis thaliana is chosen as a data source to evaluate the developed algorithm. A test data set was created by using 100 Arabidopsis genes that have gene expression data with seven different time points during cold stress condition, motif occurrence data which indicates the occurrence frequency of 614 different motifs and the chromosomal location data of each gene. Gene Ontology (http://www.geneontology.org) and TAIR (http://arabidopsis.org) databases were used to find the molecular function and biological process information of each gene in order to examine the biological accuracy of newly discovered clusters after using combined genomic data. The biological evaluation of the results showed that using combined genomic data to cluster genes resulted in new biologically relevant clusters.

With the growth of computer networks and the advancement of hardware technologies, unprecedented access to data volumes become accessible in a distributed fashion forming heterogeneous data sources. Understanding and combining these data into data warehouses, or merging remote public data into existing databases can significantly enrich the information provided by these data. This problem is called data integration: combining data residing at different sources, and providing the user with a unified view of these data. There are two issues with making use of remote data sources: (1) discovery of relevant data sources, and (2) performing the proper joins between the local data source and the relevant remote databases. Both can be solved if one can effectively identify semantically-related attributes between the local data sources and the available remote data sources. However, performing these tasks manually is time-consuming because of the large data sizes and the unavailability of schema documentation; therefore, an automated tool would be definitely more suitable. Automatically detecting similar entities based on the content is challenging due to three factors. First, because the amount of records is voluminous, it is difficult to perceive or discover information structures or relationships. Second, the schemas of the databases are unfamiliar; therefore, detecting relevant data is difficult. Third, the database entity types are heterogeneous and there is no existing solution for extracting a richer classification result from the processing of two different data types, or at least from textual and numerical data. We propose to utilize self-organizing maps (SOM) to aid the visual exploration of the large data volumes. The unsupervised classification property of SOM facilitates the integration of completely unfamiliar relational database tables and attributes based on the contents. In order to accommodate heterogeneous data types found in relational databases, we extended the term frequency – inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) measure to handle numerical and textual attribute types by unified vectorization processing. The resulting map allows the user to browse the heterogeneously typed database attributes and discover clusters of documents (attributes) having similar content. iii The discovered clusters can significantly aid in manual or automated constructions of data integrity constraints in data cleaning or schema mappings for data integration.

An interactive visualization of self-organizing radio networks is developed. When the size and complexity of today’s radio networks grows, the need of automated network organizing methods increase to cut down on work, money and mistakes. The automation, however, leads the network operators to lose control over their own network and possible trust issues come along. Instead of giving back control to the operators, which would increase costs and work, Ericsson has suggested creating a visualization making clear that their self-organizing methods work as intended and letting the operator to efficiently explore their own network data. In this thesis project a visualization application is developed allowing the network operator to explore the settings and performance of their network organized by Ericsson’s automatic algorithm called Automatic Neighbor Relations (ANR). The user can interact with the visualization by picking, filtering, and more, to find potential patterns in the data, find bad data values, and see how settings affect the performance of the network. The visualization is built around a map where parameter and performance data is presented. Other visualization components come from the visualization framework GeoAnalytics Visualization (GAV), developed at Linköpings universitet, which also stands as a basis for the entire visualization.

This dissertation develops a "neighborhood" based neural network model utilizing wavelet analysis and Self-organizing Map (SOM) to predict building baseline energy use. Wavelet analysis was used for feature extraction of the daily weather profiles. The resulting few significant wavelet coefficients represent not only average but also variation of the weather components. A SOM is used for clustering and projecting high-dimensional data into usually a one or two dimensional map to reveal the data structure which is not clear by visual inspection. In this study, neighborhoods that contain days with similar meteorological conditions are classified by a SOM using significant wavelet coefficients; a baseline model is then developed for each neighborhood. In each neighborhood, modeling is more robust without unnecessary compromises that occur in global predictor regression models. This method was applied to the Energy Predictor Shootout II dataset and compared with the winning entries for hourly energy use predictions. A comparison between the "neighborhood" based linear regression model and the change-point model for daily energy use prediction was also performed. We also studied the application of the non-parametric nearest neighborhood points approach in determining the uncertainty of energy use prediction. The uncertainty from "local" system behavior rather than from global statistical indices such as root mean square error and other measures is shown to be more realistic and credible than the statistical approaches currently used. In general, a baseline model developed by local system behavior is more reliable than a global baseline model. The "neighborhood" based neural network model was found to predict building baseline energy use more accurately and achieve more reliable estimation of energy savings as well as the associated uncertainties in energy savings from building retrofits.

<p>An interactive visualization of self-organizing radio networks is developed. When the size and complexity of today’s radio networks grows, the need of automated network organizing methods increase to cut down on work, money and mistakes. The automation, however, leads the network operators to lose control over their own network and possible trust issues come along. Instead of giving back control to the operators, which would increase costs and work, Ericsson has suggested creating a visualization making clear that their self-organizing methods work as intended and letting the operator to efficiently explore their own network data.</p><p>In this thesis project a visualization application is developed allowing the network operator to explore the settings and performance of their network organized by Ericsson’s automatic algorithm called Automatic Neighbor Relations (ANR). The user can interact with the visualization by picking, filtering, and more, to find potential patterns in the data, find bad data values, and see how settings affect the performance of the network.</p><p>The visualization is built around a map where parameter and performance data is presented. Other visualization components come from the visualization framework GeoAnalytics Visualization (GAV), developed at Linköpings universitet, which also stands as a basis for the entire visualization.</p>

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept of Physics, August 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

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Given a set of peers with overlapping interests where each peer wishes to keep track of new documents that are relevant to their interests, we propose Shrack-a self-organizing peer-to-peer (P2P) system for document sharing and tracking. The goal of a document-tracking system is to disseminate new documents as they are published. We present a framework of Shrack and propose a gossip-like pull-only information dissemination protocol. We explore and develop mechanisms to enable a self-organizing network, based on common interest of document sets among peers. Shrack peers collaboratively share new documents of interest with other peers. Interests of peers are modeled using relevant document sets and are represented as peer profiles. There is no explicit pro file exchange between peers and no global information available. We describe how peers create their user pro files, discover the existence of other peers, locally learn about interest of other peers, and finally form a self-organizing overlay network of peers with common interests. Unlike most existing P2P file sharing systems which serve their users by finding relevant documents based on an instant query, Shrack is designed to help users that have long-term interests to keep track of relevant documents that are newly available in the system. The framework can be used as an infrastructure for any kind of documents and data, but in this thesis, we focus on research publications. We built an event-driven simulation to evaluate the performance and behaviour of Shrack. We model simulated users associated with peers after a subset of authors in the ACM digital library metadata collection. The experimental results demonstrate that the Shrack dissemination protocol is scalable as the network size increases. In addition, self-organizing overlay networks, where connections between peers are based on common interests as captured by their associated document sets, can help improve the relevance of documents received by peers in terms of F-score over random peer networks. Moreover, the resulting self-organizing networks have the characteristics of social networks.