In the field of machine learning, methods for learning from single-table data have received much more attention than those for learning from multi-table, or relational data, which are generally more computationally complex. However, a significant amount of the world's data is relational. This indicates a need for algorithms that can operate efficiently on relational data and exploit the larger body of work produced in the area of single-table techniques. This thesis presents algorithms for learning from relational data that mitigate, to some extent, the complexity normally associated with such learning. All algorithms in this thesis are based on the generation of random relational rules. The assumption is that random rules enable efficient and effective relational learning, and this thesis presents evidence that this is indeed the case. To this end, a system for generating random relational rules is described, and algorithms using these rules are evaluated. These algorithms include direct classification, classification by propositionalisation, clustering, semi-supervised learning and generating random forests. The experimental results show that these algorithms perform competitively with previously published results for the datasets used, while often exhibiting lower runtime than other tested systems. This demonstrates that sufficient information for classification and clustering is retained in the rule generation process and that learning with random rules is efficient. Further applications of random rules are investigated. Propositionalisation allows single-table algorithms for classification and clustering to be applied to the resulting data, reducing the amount of relational processing required. Further results show that techniques for utilising additional unlabeled training data improve accuracy of classification in the semi-supervised setting. The thesis also develops a novel algorithm for building random forests by making efficient use of random rules to generate trees and leaves in parallel.

The current study was undertaken as a preliminary evaluation of a qualitative extension measure for use with emerging adults. A series of studies have been previously conducted to provide evidence for the reliability and validity of the RDA framework in evaluating youth development programs (Kurtines et al., 2008) and this study furthers this research to utilize RDA with emerging adults. Building on previous RDA research, the current study analyzed psychometric properties of the Identity Dimensions of Emerging Adulthood-Qualitative Extension (IDEA-QE) using RDA. Inter-coder percent agreement among the Theoretical Open Coders (TOC) and Theoretical Content Coders (TCC) for each of the category levels was moderate to high, ranging from .67 to .87. The Fleiss’ kappa across all category levels was from moderate agreement to almost perfect agreement, ranging from .60 to .88. The correlation between the TOC and the TCC demonstrated medium to high correlation, ranging from r(31)=.65, pr(31)=.74, p<.001.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Doina Caragea / In recent years, we have witnessed a significant increase in the number, size and diversity of the available data sources in many application domains. Data sources in a particular domain are autonomously created and maintained, and therefore distributed and semantically heterogeneous. In this thesis, we focused on the problem of querying such semantically heterogeneous data sources from a user's perspective. We approach this problem by using the concepts of ontologies and mappings between ontologies. A system for answering queries in a transparent way to the user has been designed and implemented. The main components of this system are an ontology mapping algorithm that maps user ontologies to data source ontologies, and a query processing engine that maps user queries to queries that can be answered by the data sources in the system. We have shown that machine learning algorithms can also be incorporated in the system, thus making it possible to learn machine learning classifiers (in particular, generative models such as Naïve Bayes) from distributed, semantically heterogeneous data sources. Because many data sources today are relational in nature, in this work we have dealt specifically with relational data sources, as opposed to flat files, XML or object oriented data sources. However, our system can be easily extended to other types of data sources.

Understanding and managing change is a strategic objective for many organisations to successfully compete in a market place; as a result, organisations are leveraging their data asset and implementing data warehouses to gain business intelligence necessary to improve their businesses. Data warehouses are expensive initiatives, one-half to two-thirds of most data warehousing efforts end in failure. In the absence of well-formalised design methodology in the industry and in the context of the debate on data architecture in data warehousing, this thesis examines why multidimensional and relational data models define the data architecture landscape in the industry. The study develops a number of propositions from the literature and empirical data to understand the factors impacting the choice of logical data model in data warehousing. Using a comparative case study method as the mean of collecting empirical data from the case organisations, the research proposes a conceptual model for logical data model adoption. The model provides a framework that guides decision making for adopting a logical data model for a data warehouse. The research conceptual model identifies the characteristics of business requirements and decision pathways for multidimensional and relational data warehouses. The conceptual model adds value by identifying the business requirements which a multidimensional and relational logical data model is empirically applicable.

O agrupamento de dados é uma técnica fundamental em aplicações de diversos campos do mercado e da ciência, como, por exemplo, no comércio, na biologia, na psiquiatria, na astronomia e na mineração da Web. Ocorre que em um subconjunto desses campos, como engenharia industrial, ciências sociais, engenharia sísmica e recuperação de documentos, as bases de dados são usualmente descritas apenas pelas proximidades entre os objetos (denominadas bases de dados relacionais). Mesmo em aplicações nas quais os dados não são naturalmente relacionais, o uso de bases relacionais permite que os dados em si sejam mantidos sob sigilo, o que pode ser de grande valia para bancos ou corretoras, por exemplo. Nesta dissertação é apresentada uma revisão de algoritmos de agrupamento de dados que lidam com bases de dados relacionais, com foco em algoritmos que produzem partições rígidas (hard ou crisp) dos dados. Particular ênfase é dada aos algoritmos evolutivos, que têm se mostrado capazes de resolver problemas de agrupamento de dados com relativa acurácia e de forma computacionalmente eficiente. Nesse contexto, propõe-se nesta dissertação um novo algoritmo evolutivo de agrupamento capaz de operar sobre dados relacionais e também capaz de estimar automaticamente o número de grupos nos dados (usualmente desconhecido em aplicações práticas). É demonstrado empiricamente que esse novo algoritmo pode superar métodos tradicionais da literatura em termos de eficiência computacional e acurácia / Data clustering is a fundamental technique for applications in several fields of science and marketing, as commerce, biology, psychiatry, astronomy, and Web mining. However, in a subset of these fields, such as industrial engineering, social sciences, earthquake engineering, and retrieval of documents, datasets are usually described only by proximities between their objects (called relational datasets). Even in applications where the data are not naturally relational, the use of relational datasets preserves the datas secrecy, which can be of great value to banks or brokers, for instance. This dissertation presents a review of data clustering algorithms which deals with relational datasets, with a focus on algorithms that produce hard or crisp partitions of data. Particular emphasis is given to evolutionary algorithms, which have proved of being able to solve problems of data clustering accurately and efficiently. In this context, we propose a new evolutionary algorithm for clustering able to operate on relational datasets and also able to automatically estimate the number of clusters (which is usually unknown in practical applications). It is empirically shown that this new algorithm can overcome traditional methods described in the literature in terms of computational efficiency and accuracy

This study explores the ways in which two educated Yemeni women understand and engage with storylines in their society which position them as 'sisters of men' obliged to conform to expectations of 'good' wives, mothers, daughters and Muslims. My own long immersion in Yemeni society, and de se experience of being discursively, interactively and structurally positioned as a woman and a wife in that context created a compelling desire to explore the ascribed social identities, roles and relationships of women in Yemen. In keeping with the feminist underpinnings of this study, I used a holistic method of investigation, the life history interview, and a voice relational mode of analysis that facilitated engagement with the women and their multiple subjectivities and positionings. Findings suggest that far from understanding themselves as de facto victims of their men and their religion, these strong and outspoken characters actively and willingly embrace those storylines derived from Islam but live them in sometimes unexpected ways. I also collaborated with my storytellers in the construction of personal narratives to enable readers to understand a little more about the world that these women inhabit, and help transform "information into shared experience" (Denzin 2009: 216). This study makes conceptual, methodological, practical and political contributions and suggests areas for further research.

We consider the concept of local sets of inference rules. Locality is a syntactic condition on rule sets which guarantees that the inference relation defined by those rules is polynomial time decidable. Unfortunately, determining whether a given rule set is local can be difficult. In this paper we define inductive locality, a strengthening of locality. We also give a procedure which can automatically recognize the locality of any inductively local rule set. Inductive locality seems to be more useful that the earlier concept of strong locality. We show that locality, as a property of rule sets, is undecidable in general.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:29:40Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2010-02-22Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T20:39:07Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 oyama_ft_me_sjrp.pdf: 1107324 bytes, checksum: 0977db2af1589dece4aa46b5882d84d6 (MD5) / O crescente avanço e a disponibilidade de recursos computacionais viabilizam o armazenamento e a manipulação de grandes bases de dados. As técnicas típicas de mineração de dados possibilitam a extração de padrões desde que os dados estejam armazenados em uma única tabela. A mineração de dados multirrelacional, por sua vez, apresenta-se como uma abordagem mais recente que permite buscar padrões provenientes de múltiplas tabelas, sendo indicada para a aplicação em bases de dados relacionais. No entanto, os algoritmos multirrelacionais de mineração de regras de associação existentes tornam-se impossibilitados de efetuar a tarefa de mineração em grandes volumes de dados, uma vez que a quantia de memória exigida para a conclusão do processamento ultrapassa a quantidade disponível. O objetivo do presente trabalho consiste em apresentar um algoritmo multirrelacional de extração de regras de associação com o foco na aplicação em grandes bases de dados relacionais. Para isso, o algoritmo proposto, MR-RADIX, apresenta uma estrutura denominada Radix-tree que representa comprimidamente a base de dados em memória. Além disso, o algoritmo utiliza-se do conceito de particionamento para subdividir a base de dados, de modo que cada partição possa ser processada integralmente em memória. Os testes realizados demonstram que o algoritmo MR-RADIX proporciona um desempenho superior a outros algoritmos correlatos e, ainda, efetua com êxito, diferentemente dos demais, a mineração de regras de associação em grandes bases de dados. / The increasing spread and availability of computing resources make feasible storage and handling of large databases. Traditional techniques of data mining allows the extraction of patterns provided that data is stored in a single table. The multi- relational data mining presents itself as a more recent approach that allows search patterns from multiple tables, indicated for use in relational databases. However, the existing multi-relational association rules mining algorithms become unable to make mining task in large data, since the amount of memory required for the completion of processing exceed the amount available. The goal of this work is to present a multi- relational algorithm for extracting association rules with focus application in large relational databases. For this the proposed algorithm MR-RADIX presents a structure called Radix-tree that represents compressly the database in memory. Moreover, the algorithm uses the concept of partitioning to subdivide the database, so that each partition can be processed entirely in memory. The tests show that the MR-RADIX algorithm provides better performance than other related algorithms, and also performs successfully, unlike others, the association rules mining in large databases.

Orientador: Carlos Roberto Valêncio / Banca: Cristina Dutra de Aguiar Ciferri / Banca: Rogéria Cristiane Gratão de Souza / Resumo: O crescente avanço e a disponibilidade de recursos computacionais viabilizam o armazenamento e a manipulação de grandes bases de dados. As técnicas típicas de mineração de dados possibilitam a extração de padrões desde que os dados estejam armazenados em uma única tabela. A mineração de dados multirrelacional, por sua vez, apresenta-se como uma abordagem mais recente que permite buscar padrões provenientes de múltiplas tabelas, sendo indicada para a aplicação em bases de dados relacionais. No entanto, os algoritmos multirrelacionais de mineração de regras de associação existentes tornam-se impossibilitados de efetuar a tarefa de mineração em grandes volumes de dados, uma vez que a quantia de memória exigida para a conclusão do processamento ultrapassa a quantidade disponível. O objetivo do presente trabalho consiste em apresentar um algoritmo multirrelacional de extração de regras de associação com o foco na aplicação em grandes bases de dados relacionais. Para isso, o algoritmo proposto, MR-RADIX, apresenta uma estrutura denominada Radix-tree que representa comprimidamente a base de dados em memória. Além disso, o algoritmo utiliza-se do conceito de particionamento para subdividir a base de dados, de modo que cada partição possa ser processada integralmente em memória. Os testes realizados demonstram que o algoritmo MR-RADIX proporciona um desempenho superior a outros algoritmos correlatos e, ainda, efetua com êxito, diferentemente dos demais, a mineração de regras de associação em grandes bases de dados. / Abstract: The increasing spread and availability of computing resources make feasible storage and handling of large databases. Traditional techniques of data mining allows the extraction of patterns provided that data is stored in a single table. The multi- relational data mining presents itself as a more recent approach that allows search patterns from multiple tables, indicated for use in relational databases. However, the existing multi-relational association rules mining algorithms become unable to make mining task in large data, since the amount of memory required for the completion of processing exceed the amount available. The goal of this work is to present a multi- relational algorithm for extracting association rules with focus application in large relational databases. For this the proposed algorithm MR-RADIX presents a structure called Radix-tree that represents compressly the database in memory. Moreover, the algorithm uses the concept of partitioning to subdivide the database, so that each partition can be processed entirely in memory. The tests show that the MR-RADIX algorithm provides better performance than other related algorithms, and also performs successfully, unlike others, the association rules mining in large databases. / Mestre

O agrupamento de dados é uma técnica fundamental em aplicações de diversos campos do mercado e da ciência, como, por exemplo, no comércio, na biologia, na psiquiatria, na astronomia e na mineração da Web. Ocorre que em um subconjunto desses campos, como engenharia industrial, ciências sociais, engenharia sísmica e recuperação de documentos, as bases de dados são usualmente descritas apenas pelas proximidades entre os objetos (denominadas bases de dados relacionais). Mesmo em aplicações nas quais os dados não são naturalmente relacionais, o uso de bases relacionais permite que os dados em si sejam mantidos sob sigilo, o que pode ser de grande valia para bancos ou corretoras, por exemplo. Nesta dissertação é apresentada uma revisão de algoritmos de agrupamento de dados que lidam com bases de dados relacionais, com foco em algoritmos que produzem partições rígidas (hard ou crisp) dos dados. Particular ênfase é dada aos algoritmos evolutivos, que têm se mostrado capazes de resolver problemas de agrupamento de dados com relativa acurácia e de forma computacionalmente eficiente. Nesse contexto, propõe-se nesta dissertação um novo algoritmo evolutivo de agrupamento capaz de operar sobre dados relacionais e também capaz de estimar automaticamente o número de grupos nos dados (usualmente desconhecido em aplicações práticas). É demonstrado empiricamente que esse novo algoritmo pode superar métodos tradicionais da literatura em termos de eficiência computacional e acurácia / Data clustering is a fundamental technique for applications in several fields of science and marketing, as commerce, biology, psychiatry, astronomy, and Web mining. However, in a subset of these fields, such as industrial engineering, social sciences, earthquake engineering, and retrieval of documents, datasets are usually described only by proximities between their objects (called relational datasets). Even in applications where the data are not naturally relational, the use of relational datasets preserves the datas secrecy, which can be of great value to banks or brokers, for instance. This dissertation presents a review of data clustering algorithms which deals with relational datasets, with a focus on algorithms that produce hard or crisp partitions of data. Particular emphasis is given to evolutionary algorithms, which have proved of being able to solve problems of data clustering accurately and efficiently. In this context, we propose a new evolutionary algorithm for clustering able to operate on relational datasets and also able to automatically estimate the number of clusters (which is usually unknown in practical applications). It is empirically shown that this new algorithm can overcome traditional methods described in the literature in terms of computational efficiency and accuracy