The 1st International Workshop on High Dimensional Data Mining (HDM)
In conjunction with the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (IEEE ICDM 2013) in Dallas, Texas.

 

 

Schedule

 8:45 - Opening: Welcome & Introduction by Ata Kaban
 9:00 - Invited Talk: Jo Etzel, "High dimensional data case study: fMRI MVPA"

10:00 - coffee break
10:30 - Invited Talk: Bob Durrant, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Random Projections in Computer Science"

12:00 - lunch break
13:30 - Invited Talk: Stephan Gunnemann,
"Advanced Subspace Clustering Techniques"

14:30 - Peng Jiang and Michael T Heath, "Pattern Discovery in High Dimensional Binary Data"
15:00 - coffee break
15:30 - Michael E. Houle, "Dimensionality, Discriminability, Density & Distance Distributions"
16:00 - Arthur Flexer and Dominik Schnitzer, "Can Shared Nearest Neighbors Reduce Hubness in High-Dimensional Spaces? "

16:30 - Jiangbo Yuan and Xiuwen Liu, "Transform Residual K-means Trees for Scalable Clustering"
17:00 - Ata Kaban, "A New Look at Compressed Ordinary Least Squares"
17:30 - 18:00 Discussion & Closing


 

Invited Speakers

 

Bob Durrant

Title: "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Random Projections in Computer Science"

Abstract:

Random projections have been used as a dimensionality reduction technique for large data since the appearance of Arriaga and Vempala’s seminal FOCS 1999 paper, and they continue to find applications both within the field of Machine Learning and elsewhere. Starting with some motivating examples from Machine Learning and Data Mining, this talk will review some key theoretical properties of random projections, and the practical applications this theory has inspired. In particular, we will cover the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma which gives conditions under which random projections approximately preserve geometric properties of data and give related applications, discuss the field of Compressed Sensing from which one can derive guarantees for techniques working with sparse data which we illustrate in the setting of SVM, and discuss more recent theory giving guarantees for linear classifiers and regressors working with non-sparse data. Finally we consider the use of random projections as an efficient method for regularizing rank-deficient covariance and precision matrix estimates, and we describe two novel applications of this approach to classification and unconstrained large-scale continuous optimization.

Short Bio:

Bob Durrant is a lecturer in the Department of Statistics at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, where he is also a member of the Machine Learning group.
He received his BSc degree in Mathematics from the Open University UK, and his MSc and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the University of Birmingham, supervised by Ata Kaban. He defended his PhD thesis in April 2013 when his examiners were John Shawe-Taylor and Peter Tino.
Bob's recent research has been mostly focused on the effects of random projections on classifier performance, where his main contributions have been theoretical results focusing on linear discriminants and kernel linear discriminants published at KDD 2010, ICPR 2010 (Prize-winning paper: Best Student Paper in Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning track), Pattern Recognition Letters 2011 (Invited paper), AIStats 2012, and ICML 2013. He has a side interest in optimization problems, and his novel application of random projections to large-scale continuous optimization won the Best Paper award in the EDA track at GECCO 2013. An invited extension of this work is currently under review for the MIT Journal Evolutionary Computation.
Bob's current research is focused on explaining the utility of classifier ensembles in settings where the number of data features is much greater than the number of training examples; published preliminary work in this direction won the Best Paper award at ACML 2013.

 

Jo Etzel

Title: "High dimensional data case study: fMRI MVPA"

Abstract:

fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) studies present researchers with many "interesting" aspects: datasets typically include tens of thousands of features, measured at dozens to thousands of time points, but often only a few tens of examples. Additionally, the data has an incredibly complex structure, including multiple spatial and temporal dependencies, on top of the usual complications involved in studies of human behavior. Nevertheless, machine learning and data mining techniques have successfully extracted information from these datasets, work often called "brain decoding", "MVPA" (multi-voxel pattern analysis), or even "mind reading".

In this talk I will introduce fMRI data from an analyst's viewpoint, with the goal of providing a foundation for understanding (and hopefully becoming excited by) this particular application. I will describe actual datasets, typical approaches, and outline open issues for the field, including below-chance accuracy and significance testing.

Short Bio:

Jo Etzel completed a PhD in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at Iowa State University under the supervision of Julie Dickerson and Ralph Adolphs, then a postdoc under Christian Keysers at the Social Brain Lab, University Medical Center Groningen (The Netherlands). Since 2010 Jo has worked as a Research Analyst in the Psychology Department at Washington University in St. Louis, primarily with the groups of Todd Braver, Jeff Zacks, and Deanna Barch. Her research interests are focused on methodology, particularly multivariate analyses of fMRI data, but also nonparametric statistics and psychophysiological measures. Jo blogs about fMRI analysis at mvpa.blogspot.com.

 

Stephan Gunnemann

Title: "Advanced Subspace Clustering Techniques"

Abstract:

Clustering is one of the core data mining tasks and aims at grouping similar objects while separating dissimilar ones. Since in today's applications usually many characteristics for each object are recorded, one cannot expect to find similar objects by considering all attributes together. As a general solution to this problem, the paradigm of subspace clustering has been introduced. It aims at detecting clusters hidden in locally relevant subspace projections of the data.

In this talk, I will discuss novel methods for effective subspace clustering that tackle important challenges such as redundancy handling and the task of detecting multiple overlapping clusterings. Besides presenting methods for the case of vector data, I will introduce techniques which extend the subspace clustering paradigm to the domain of network data.

Short Bio:

Stephan Gunnemann is a Postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, USA. From 2008 to 2012, he has been a research associate at the data management and data exploration group at RWTH Aachen University, Germany. Dr. Gunnemann received his PhD in Computer Science from RWTH Aachen University in 2012. His research interests include graph mining and the mining of non-redundant, multiple clustering solutions for high dimensional and relational data.

 

 

Description of Workshop

Some 13 years ago, Stanford statistician D. Donoho predicted that the 21st century will be the century of data. "We can say with complete confidence that in the coming century, high-dimensional data analysis will be a very significant activity, and completely new methods of high-dimensional data analysis will be developed; we just don't know what they are yet." -- D. Donoho, 2000.

Indeed, unprecedented technological advances lead to increasingly high dimensional data sets in all areas of science, engineering and businesses. These include genomics and proteomics, biomedical imaging, signal processing, astrophysics, finance, web, and market basket analysis, among many others. The number of features in such data is often of the order of thousands or millions -- that is much larger than the available sample size. This renders classical data analysis methods inadequate, questionable, or inefficient at best, and calls for new approaches.

Some of the manifestations of this curse of dimensionality are the following:

 

-       High dimensional geometry defeats our intuition rooted in low dimensional experiences so that data presentation and visualisation become particularly challenging.

-       Distance concentration is the phenomenon of high dimensional probability spaces where the contrast between pairwise distances vanishes as the dimensionality increases -- this makes distances meaningless, and affects all methods that rely on a notion of distance.

-       Bogus correlations and misleading estimates may result when trying to fit complex models for which the effective dimensionality is too large compared to the number of data points available.

-       The accumulation of noise may confound our ability to find low dimensional intrinsic structure hidden in the high dimensional data.

-       The computation cost of processing high dimensional data is often prohibiting.

Topics

This workshop aims to promote new advances and research directions to address the curses, and to uncover and exploit the blessings of high dimensionality in data mining. Topics of interest range from theoretical foundations, to algorithms and implementation, to applications and empirical studies of mining high dimensional data, including (but not limited to) the following:

 

o   Systematic studies of how the curse of dimensionality affects data mining methods

o   New data mining techniques that exploit some properties of high dimensional data spaces

o   Theoretical underpinnings of mining data whose dimensionality is larger than the sample size

o   Stability and reliability analyses for data mining in high dimensions

o   Adaptive and non-adaptive dimensionality reduction for noisy high dimensional data sets

o   Methods of random projections, compressed sensing, and random matrix theory applied to high dimensional data mining

o   Models of low intrinsic dimension, such as sparse representation, manifold models, latent structure models, and studies of their noise tolerance

o   Classification, regression, clustering of high dimensional complex data sets

o   Functional data mining

o   Data presentation and visualisation methods for very high dimensional data sets

o   Data mining applications to real problems in science, engineering or businesses where the data is high dimensional

 

Paper submission

High quality original submissions are solicited for oral and poster presentation at the workshop. Papers should not exceed a maximum of 8 pages, and must follow the IEEE ICDM format requirements of the main conference. All submissions will be peer-reviewed, and all accepted workshop papers will be published in the proceedings by the IEEE Computer Society Press. Submit your paper here.

Important dates

Submission deadline: August 17, 2013

Notifications to authors: September 24, 2013.

Workshop: December 7, 2013.

 

Programme committee

Adam Kowalczyk - Victoria Research Laboratory, NICTA, Australia

Arthur Zimek - LMU Munich, Germany

Barbara Hammer - Clausthal University of Technology, Germany

Ata Kaban - University of Birmingham, UK

John A. Lee - Universite Catholique de Louvain, Belgium

Laurens van der Maaten - Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Mark Last - University of the Negev, Israel

Milos Radovanovic - University of Novi Sad, Serbia

Pierre Alquier - University College Dublin, Ireland

Robert J. Durrant - University of Waikato, NZ

Stephan Gunnemann - Carnegie Mellon University

Yiming Ying - University of Exeter, UK

 

Workshop organiser

Ata Kaban

School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK

 

Related links & resources: Analytics, Big Data, Data Mining, & Data Science Resources