INTRODUCTION TO BIG DATA

QUESTION BANK
PART-A
1. What is Big Data?
Big data is a field that treats ways to analyze, systematically extract information from,
or otherwise deal with data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by
traditional data-processing application software.
2. List out the best practices of Big Data Analytics.
1. Start at the End
2. Build an Analytical Culture.
3. Re-Engineer Data Systems for Analytics
4. Focus on Useful Data Islands.
5. Iterate often.
3. Write down the characteristics of Big Data Applications.
a) Data Throttling
b) Computation- restricted throttling
c) Large Data Volumes
d) Significant Data Variety
e) Benefits from Data parallelization
4. Write down the four computing resources of Big Data Storage.
a) Processing Capability
b) Memory
c) Storage
d) Network
5. What is HDFS?
Apache Hadoop is a collection of open-source software utilities that facilitate using a
network of many computers to solve problems involving massive amounts of data and
computation. It provides a software framework for distributed storage and processing
of big data using the MapReduce programming model.
6. What is MapReduce?
MapReduce is a processing technique and a program model for distributed computing
based on java. The MapReduce algorithm contains two important tasks, namely Map
and Reduce. Map takes a set of data and converts it into another set of data, where
individual elements are broken down into tuples (key/value pairs).
7. What is YARN?
YARN is an Apache Hadoop technology and stands for Yet Another Resource
Negotiator. YARN is a large-scale, distributed operating system for big data
applications. YARN is a software rewrite that is capable of decoupling MapReduce's
resource management and scheduling capabilities from the data processing
component.
8. What is Map Reduce Programming Model?
MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing
and generating big data sets with a parallel, distributed algorithm on a cluster.
The model is a specialization of the split-apply-combine strategy for data analysis.
9. What are the characteristics of big data?
Big data can be described by the following characteristics
Volume - The quantity of data generated and stored data. The size of the data
determines the value and potential insight- and whether it can actually be considered
big data or not.
Variety -The type and nature of the data. This helps people who analyze it to
effectively use the resulting insight.
Velocity -In this context, the speed at which the data is generated and processed to
meet the demands and challenges that lie in the path of growth and development.
Variability- Inconsistency of the data set can hamper processes to handle and manage
it.
Veracity-The data quality of captured data can vary greatly, affecting the accurate
analysis
10. What is Big Data Platform?
• Big Data Platform is integrated IT solution for Big Data management which
combines several software systems, software tools and hardware to provide easy to
use tools system to enterprises.
• It is a single one-stop solution for all Big Data needs of an enterprise irrespective of
size and data volume. Big Data Platform is enterprise class IT solution for developing,
deploying and managing Big Data.
 PART -B & C
1. What is Bigdata? Describe the main features of a big data in detail.
Basics of Bigdata Platform

 Big Data platform is IT solution which combines several Big Data tools
and utilities into one packaged solution for managing and analyzing Big
Data.

 Big data platform is a type of IT solution that combines the features and
capabilities of several big data application and utilities within a single solution.
 It is an enterprise class IT platform that enables organization in developing,
deploying, operating and managing a big data infrastructure /environment.

Big Data Platform

 Big Data Platform is integrated IT solution for Big Data management which
combines several software systems, software tools and hardware to provide
easy to use tools system to enterprises.
 It is a single one-stop solution for all Big Data needs of an enterprise
irrespective of size and data volume. Big Data Platform is enterprise class IT
solution for developing, deploying and managing Big Data.
 There are several Open source and commercial Big Data Platform in the market
with varied features which can be used in Big Data environment.
 Big data platform is a type of IT solution that combines the features and
capabilities of several big data application and utilities within a single solution.
 It is an enterprise class ITplatformthat enables organization in developing,
deploying, operating and managing abig datainfrastructure /environment.
 Big data platform generally consists of big data storage, servers, database, big
data management, business intelligence and other big data management utilities
 It also supports custom development, querying and integration with other systems.
 The primary benefit behind a big data platform is to reduce the complexity of
multiple vendors/ solutions into a one cohesive solution.
 Big data platform are also delivered through cloud where the provider provides
an all inclusive big data solutions and services.

Features of Big Data Platform

Here are most important features of any good Big Data Analytics Platform:
a) Big Data platform should be able to accommodate new platforms and tool
based on the business requirement. Because business needs can change due to
new technologies or due to change in business process.
b) It should support linear scale-out
c) It should have capability for rapid deployment
d) It should support variety of data format
e) Platform should provide data analysis and reporting tools
f) It should provide real-time data analysis software
 g) It should have tools for searching the data through large data sets

Big data is a term for data sets that are so large or complex that traditional data
processing applications are inadequate.

Challenges include
 Analysis,
 Capture,
 Data Curation,
 Search,
 Sharing,
 Storage,
 Transfer,
 Visualization,
 Querying,
 Updating

Information Privacy.
 The term often refers simply to the use of predictive analytics or certain other
advancedmethods to extract value from data, and seldom to a particular size of
data set.

 ACCURACY in big data may lead to more confident decision making, and
better decisions can result in greater operational efficiency, cost reduction and
reduced risk.
 Big data usually includes data sets with sizes beyond the ability of
commonly used
 software tools to capture, curate, manage, and process data within a tolerable
elapsed
 time. Big data "size" is a constantly moving target.
 Big data requires a set of techniques and technologies with new forms of
integration to
 reveal insights from datasets that are diverse, complex, and of a massive scale

List of BigData Platforms

a) Hadoop
b) Cloudera
c) Amazon Web Services
d) Hortonworks
e) MapR
f) IBM Open Platform
g) Microsoft HDInsight
h) Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop
i) Datastax Enterprise Analytics
 j) Teradata Enterprise Access for Hadoop
k) Pivotal HD

a) Hadoop
 Hadoop is open-source, Java based programming framework and server
software which is used to save and analyze data with the help of 100s or even
1000s of commodity servers in a clustered environment.
 Hadoop is designed to storage and process large datasets extremely fast and in
fault tolerant way.
 Hadoop uses HDFS (Hadoop File System) for storing data on cluster of
commodity computers. If any server goes down it know how to replicate the
data and there is no loss of data even in hardware failure.
 Hadoop is Apache sponsored project and it consists of many software packages
which runs on the top of the Apache Hadoop system.
 Top Hadoop based Commercial Big Data Analytics Platform
 Hadoop provides set of tools and software for making the backbone of the Big
Data analytics system.
 Hadoop ecosystem provides necessary tools and software for handling and
analyzing Big Data.
 On the top of the Hadoop system many applications can be developed and
plugged-in to provide ideal solution for Big Data needs.

b) Cloudera
 Cloudra is one of the first commercial Hadoop based Big Data Analytics
Platform offering Big Data solution.
 Its product range includes Cloudera Analytic DB, Cloudera Operational DB,
Cloudera Data Science & Engineering and Cloudera Essentials.
 All these products are based on the Apache Hadoop and provides real-time
processing and analytics of massive data sets.

c) Amazon Web Services

 Amazon is offering Hadoop environment in cloud as part of its Amazon Web
Services package.
 AWS Hadoop solution is hosted solution which runs on Amazon’s Elastic
Cloud Compute and Simple Storage Service (S3).
 Enterprises can use the Amazon AWS to run their Big Data processing
analytics in the cloud environment.
 Amazon EMR allows companies to setup and easily scale Apache Hadoop,
Spark, HBase, Presto, Hive, and other Big Data Frameworks using its cloud
hosting environment.
d) Hortonworks
 Hortonworks is using 100% open-source software without any propriety
software. Hortonworks were the one who first integrated support for Apache
HCatalog.
 The Hortonworks is a Big Data company based in California.
 This company is developing and supports application for Apache Hadoop.
Hortonworks Hadoop distribution is 100% open source and its enterprise ready with
following features:
 Centralized management and configuration of clusters
 Security and data governance are built in feature of the system
 Centralized security administration across the system

e) MapR
 MapR is another Big Data platform which us using the Unix file system for
handling data.
 It is not using HDFS and this system is easy to learn anyone familiar with the
Unix system.
 This solution integrates Hadoop, Spark, and Apache Drill with a real-time data
processing feature.

f) IBM Open Platform

 IBM also offers Big Data Platform which is based on the Hadoop eco-system
software.
 IBM well knows company in software and data computing.
It uses the latest Hadoop software and provides following features (IBM Open Platform
Features):
 Based on 100% Open source software
 Native support for rolling Hadoop upgrades
 Support for long running applications within YEARN.
 Support for heterogeneous storage which includes HDFS for in-memory and
SSD in addition to HDD
 Native support for Spark, developers can use Java, Python and Scala to written
program
 Platform includes Ambari, which is a best tool for provisioning, managing &
monitoring Apache Hadoop clusters
 IBM Open Platform includes all the software of Hadoop ecosystem e.g. HDFS,
YARN, MapReduce, Ambari, Hbase, Hive, Oozie, Parquet, Parquet Format,
Pig, Snappy, Solr, Spark, Sqoop, Zookeeper, Open JDK, Knox, Slider
 Developer can download the trial Docker Image or Native installer for testing
and learning the system
 Application is well supported by IBM technology team
g) Microsoft HDInsight
 The Microsoft HDInsight is also based on the Hadoop distribution and it’s a
commercial Big Data platform from Microsoft.
 Microsoft is software giant which is into development of windows operating
system for Desktop users and Server users.
 This is the big Hadoop distribution offering which runs on the Windows and
Azure environment.
 It offers customized, optimized open source Hadoop based analytics clusters
which uses Spark, Hive, MapReduce, HBase, Strom, Kafka and R Server
which runs on the Hadoop system on windows/Azure environment.

2. List the main characteristics of Big Data.

Characteristics of Big Data
(i) Volume – The name Big Data itself is related to a size which is enormous. Size of
data plays a very crucial role in determining value out of data. Also, whether a
particular data can actually be considered as a Big Data or not, is dependent upon the
volume of data. Hence, 'Volume' is one characteristic which needs to be considered
while dealing with Big Data.
(ii) Variety – The next aspect of Big Data is its variety.Variety refers to heterogeneous
sources and the nature of data, both structured and unstructured. During earlier days,
spreadsheets and databases were the only sources of data considered by most of the
applications. Nowadays, data in the form of emails, photos, videos, monitoring
devices, PDFs, audio, etc. are also being considered in the analysis applications. This
variety of unstructured data poses certain issues for storage, mining and analyzing
data.

(iii) Velocity – The term 'velocity' refers to the speed of generation of data. How fast
the data is generated and processed to meet the demands, determines real potential in
the data.
Big Data Velocity deals with the speed at which data flows in from sources like
business processes, application logs, networks, and social media sites, sensors, Mobile
devices, etc. The flow of data is massive and continuous.
(iv) Variability – This refers to the inconsistency which can be shown by the data at
times, thus hampering the process of being able to handle and manage the data
effectively.
Benefits of Big Data Processing
Ability to process Big Data brings in multiple benefits, such as-
Businesses can utilize outside intelligence while taking decisions
Access to social data from search engines and sites like Facebook, twitter are enabling
organizations to fine tune their business strategies.
Improved customer service
Traditional customer feedback systems are getting replaced by new systems designed
with Big Data technologies. In these new systems, Big Data and natural language
processing technologies are being used to read and evaluate consumer responses.
Early identification of risk to the product/services, if any
Better operational efficiency
Big Data technologies can be used for creating a staging area or landing zone for new
data before identifying what data should be moved to the data warehouse. In addition,
such integration of Big Data technologies and data warehouse helps an organization to
offload infrequently accessed data.
3. Explain in detail about Nature of Data and its applications.
Data
 Data is a set of values of qualitative or quantitative variables; restated, pieces
of data are individual pieces of information.
 Data is measured, collected and reported, and analyzed, whereupon it can be
visualized using graphs or images.

Properties of Data
For examining the properties of data, reference to the various definitions of data.
Reference to these definitions reveals that following are the properties of data:
a) Amenability of use
b) Clarity
c) Accuracy
d) Essence
e) Aggregation
f) Compression
g) Refinement

.Amenability of use: From the dictionary meaning of data it is learnt that data are
facts used in deciding something. In short, data are meant to be used as a base for
arriving at definitive conclusions.

a) Clarity: Data are a crystallized presentation. Without clarity, the meaning

desired to be communicated will remain hidden.

b) Accuracy: Data should be real, complete and accurate. Accuracy is thus, an

essential property of data.

c) Essence: A large quantities of data are collected and they have to be

Compressed and refined. Data so refined can present the essence or derived
qualitative value, of the matter.

d) Aggregation: Aggregation is cumulating or adding up.

 e) Compression: Large amounts of data are always compressed to make them
more meaningful. Compress data to a manageable size.Graphs and charts are
some examples of compressed data.

f) Refinement: Data require processing or refinement. When refined, they are

capable of leading to conclusions or even generalizations. Conclusions can be
drawn only when data are processed or refined.

TYPES OF DATA
 In order to understand the nature of data it is necessary to categorize them into
various types.
 Different categorizations of data are possible.
 The first such categorization may be on the basis of disciplines, e.g.,
Sciences, Social Sciences, etc. in which they are generated.
 Within each of these fields, there may be several ways in which data can be
categorized into types.

There are four types of data:

 Nominal
 Ordinal
 Interval
 Ratio
Each offers a unique set of characteristics, which impacts the type of analysis that can
be performed.

The distinction between the four types of scales center on three different characteristics:
1. The order of responses – whether it matters or not
2. The distance between observations – whether it matters or is interpretable
3. The presence or inclusion of a true zero
Nominal Scales
Nominal scales measure categories and have the following characteristics:
 Order: The order of the responses or observations does not matter.
 Distance: Nominal scales do not hold distance. The distance between a 1 and a
2 is not the same as a 2 and 3.
  True Zero: There is no true or real zero. In a nominal scale, zero is
uninterruptable.
Appropriate statistics for nominal scales: mode, count, frequencies
Displays: histograms or bar charts

Ordinal Scales
At the risk of providing a tautological definition, ordinal scales measure, well, order.
So, our characteristics for ordinal scales are:
 Order: The order of the responses or observations matters.
 Distance: Ordinal scales do not hold distance. The distance between first and
second is unknown as is the distance between first and third along with all
observations.
 True Zero: There is no true or real zero. An item, observation, or category
cannot finish zero.
Appropriate statistics for ordinal scales: count, frequencies, mode
Displays: histograms or bar charts

Interval Scales
Interval scales provide insight into the variability of the observations or data.
Classic interval scales are Likert scales (e.g., 1 - strongly agree and 9 - strongly
disagree) and
Semantic Differential scales (e.g., 1 - dark and 9 - light).
In an interval scale, users could respond to “I enjoy opening links to thwebsite from a
company email” with a response ranging on a scale of values.

The characteristics of interval scales are:

 Order: The order of the responses or observations does matter.
 Distance: Interval scales do offer distance. That is, the distance from 1 to 2
appears the same as 4 to 5. Also, six is twice as much as three and two is half
of four. Hence, we can perform arithmetic operations on the data.
 True Zero: There is no zero with interval scales. However, data can be
rescaled in a manner that contains zero. An interval scales measure from 1 to 9
remains the same as 11 to 19 because we added 10 to all values. Similarly, a 1
to 9 interval scale is the same a -4 to 4 scale because we subtracted 5 from all
values. Although the new scale contains zero, zero remains uninterruptable
because it only appears in the scale from the transformation.

Appropriate statistics for interval scales: count, frequencies, mode, median, mean,
standard deviation (and variance), skewness, and kurtosis.
Displays: histograms or bar charts, line charts, and scatter plots.

Ratio Scales
Ratio scales appear as nominal scales with a true zero.
They have the following characteristics:
 Order: The order of the responses or observations matters.
 Distance: Ratio scales do do have an interpretable distance.
  True Zero: There is a true zero.
Income is a classic example of a ratio scale:
 Order is established. We would all prefer $100 to $1!
 Zero dollars means we have no income (or, in accounting terms, our revenue
exactly equals our expenses!)
 Distance is interpretable, in that $20 appears as twice $10 and $50 is half of a
$100.
For the web analyst, the statistics for ratio scales are the same as for interval scales.
Appropriate statistics for ratio scales: count, frequencies, mode, median, mean,
standard deviation (and variance), skewness, and kurtosis.
Displays: histograms or bar charts, line charts, and scatter plots.

4. Explain in detail about Storage Considerations in Big Data.

In any environment intended to support the analysis of massive amounts of data, there
must be the infrastructure supporting the data lifecycle from acquisition, preparation,
integration, and execution. The need to acquire and manage massive amounts of data
suggests a need for specialty storage systems to accommodate the big data
applications.
When evaluating specialty storage offerings, some variables to
consider include:
• Scalability, which looks at whether expectations for performance improvement are
aligned with the additional of storage resources, and the degree to which the storage
subsystem can support massive data volumes of increasing size.
• Extensibility, which examines how flexible the storage system’s architecture is in
allowing the system to be grown without the constraint of artificial limits.
• Accessibility, which looks at any limitations or constraints in providing
simultaneous access to an expanding user community without compromising
performance.
• Fault tolerance, which imbues the storage environment with the capability to recover
from intermittent failures.
• High-speed I/O capacity, which measures whether the input/output channels can
satisfy the demanding timing requirements for absorbing, storing, and sharing large
data volumes.
• Integrability, which measures how well the storage environment can be integrated
into the production environment.
Often, the storage framework involves a software layer for managing a collection of
storage resources and providing much of these capabilities. The software configures
storage for replication to provide a level of fault tolerance, as well as managing
communications using standard protocols (such as UDP or TCP/IP) among the
different processing nodes. In addition, some frameworks will replicate stored data,
providing redundancy in the event of a fault or failure.
5. Explain in detail about HDFS.

HDFS is a distributed file system that handles large data sets running on commodity
hardware. It is used to scale a single Apache Hadoop cluster to hundreds (and even
thousands) of nodes. HDFS is one of the major components of Apache Hadoop, the
others being MapReduce and YARN. HDFS should not be confused with or replaced
by Apache HBase, which is a column-oriented non-relational database management
system that sits on top of HDFS and can better support real-time data needs with its
in- memory processing engine.
Fast recovery from hardware failures
Because one HDFS instance may consist of thousands of servers, failure of at least
one server is inevitable. HDFS has been built to detect faults and automatically
recover quickly.
Access to streaming data
HDFS is intended more for batch processing versus interactive use, so the emphasis in
the design is for high data throughput rates, which accommodate streaming access to
data sets.
Accommodation of large data sets
HDFS accommodates applications that have data sets typically gigabytes to terabytes
in size. HDFS provides high aggregate data bandwidth and can scale to hundreds of
nodes in a single cluster.
Portability
To facilitate adoption, HDFS is designed to be portable across multiple hardware
platforms and to be compatible with a variety of underlying operating systems.

6. Briefly discuss about MapReduce and YARN.

YARN stands for “Yet Another Resource Negotiator “. It was introduced in Hadoop
2.0 to remove the bottleneck on Job Tracker which was present in Hadoop 1.0. YARN
was described as a “Redesigned Resource Manager” at the time of its launching, but it
has
now evolved to be known as large-scale distributed operating system used for Big
Data processing.
YARN architecture basically separates resource management layer from the
processing layer. In Hadoop 1.0 version, the responsibility of Job tracker is split
between the resource manager and application manager
YARN also allows different data processing engines like graph processing, interactive
processing, stream processing as well as batch processing to run and process data
stored in HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) thus making the system much more
efficient. Through its various components, it can dynamically allocate various
resources and schedule the application processing. For large volume data processing,
it is quite necessary to manage the available resources properly so that every
application can leverage them.
YARN Features: YARN gained popularity because of the following features-
Scalability: The scheduler in Resource manager of YARN architecture allows
Hadoop to extend and manage thousands of nodes and clusters.
Compatibility: YARN supports the existing map-reduce applications without
disruptions thus making it compatible with Hadoop 1.0 as well.
Cluster Utilization: Since YARN supports Dynamic utilization of cluster in Hadoop,
which enables optimized Cluster Utilization.
Multi-tenancy: It allows multiple engine access thus giving organizations a benefit of
multi-tenancy.
The main components of YARN architecture include:
Client: It submits map-reduce jobs.
Resource Manager: It is the master daemon of YARN and is responsible for resource
assignment and management among all the applications. Whenever it receives a
processing request, it forwards it to the corresponding node manager and allocates
resources for the completion of the request accordingly. It has two major components:
Scheduler: It performs scheduling based on the allocated application and available
resources. It is a pure scheduler, means it does not perform other tasks such as
monitoring or tracking and does not guarantee a restart if a task fails. The YARN
scheduler supports plugins such as Capacity Scheduler and Fair Scheduler to partition
the cluster resources.
Application manager: It is responsible for accepting the application and negotiating
the first container from the resource manager. It also restarts the Application Manager
container if a task fails.
Node Manager: It take care of individual node on Hadoop cluster and manages
application and workflow and that particular node. Its primary job is to keep-up with
the Node Manager. It monitors resource usage, performs log management and also
kills a container based on directions from the resource manager. It is also responsible
for creating the container process and start it on the request of Application master.
Application Master: An application is a single job submitted to a framework. The
application manager is responsible for negotiating resources with the resource
manager, tracking the status and monitoring progress of a single application. The
application master requests the container from the node manager by sending a
Container Launch Context (CLC) which includes everything an application needs to
run. Once the application is started, it sends the health report to the resource manager
from time-to- time.
Container: It is a collection of physical resources such as RAM, CPU cores and disk
on a single node. The containers are invoked by Container Launch Context (CLC)
which is a record that contains information such as environment variables, security
tokens, dependencies etc.
Application workflow in Hadoop YARN:
Client submits an application
The Resource Manager allocates a container to start the Application Manager
The Application Manager registers itself with the Resource Manager
The Application Manager negotiates containers from the Resource Manager
The Application Manager notifies the Node Manager to launch containers
Application code is executed in the container
Client contacts Resource Manager/Application Manager to monitor application’s status
Once the processing is complete, the Application Manager un-registers with the
Resource Manager.
 UNIT II CLUSTERING AND CLASSIFICATION
QUESTION BANK
PART A
1. What is classification?
Classification is:
– the data mining process of
– finding a model (or function) that
– describes and distinguishes data classes or concepts,
– for the purpose of being able to use the model to predict the class of objects
whose class label is unknown.
•That is, predicts categorical class labels (discrete or nominal).
•Classifies the data (constructs a model) based on the training set.
•It predicts group membership for data instances.
2. List the categories of clustering methods.
a) Partitioning methods
b) Hierarchical methods
c) Density based methods
d) Grid based methods
e) Model based methods
3. Explain various steps in clustering process.
• Find groups of similar data items
• Statistical techniques require some definition of “distance” (e.g. between travel
profiles) while
conceptual techniques use background concepts and logical descriptionsUses:
• Demographic analysis Technologies:
• Self-Organizing Maps
• Probability Densities
• Conceptual Clustering
4. What are the requirements of cluster analysis?
The basic requirements of cluster analysis are
 Scalability
 Ability to deal with different types of attributes
 Ability to deal with noisy data
 Minimal requirements for domain knowledge to determine input parameters
 Constraint based clustering
 Interpretability and usability
5. What is Cluster Analysis?
•Cluster analysis: A task that does
– Grouping a set of data objects into clusters.
– Finding groups of objects such that the objects in a group will be similar (or related)
to one another and different from (or unrelated to) the objects in other groups
• A cluster analysis is the process of analyzing the various clusters to organize the
different
objects into meaningful and descriptive objects.
6. What is a “decision tree”?
It is a flow-chart like tree structure, where each internal node denotes a test on an
attribute, each
branch represents an outcome of the test, and leaf nodes represent classes or class
distributions.
Decision tree is a predictive model. Each branch of the tree is a classification question
and
leaves of the tree are partition of the dataset with their classification.
7. Define the concept of classification.
Two step process
a) A model is built describing a predefined set of data classes or concepts. The model
is constructed by analyzing database tuples described by attributes.
b) The model is used for classification.
8. What are Bayesian Classifiers?
 Bayesian Classifiers are statistical classifiers.
 They can predict class membership probabilities, such as the probability that a
given sample belongs to a particular class.
9. How will you solve a classification problem using Decision Tree?
• Decision Tree Induction:
• Construct a decision tree using training data.
• For each ti € D apply the decision tree to determine its class ti-tuple D-Database
10. Define k-means clustering.
Given a collection of objects each with n measurable attributes, k-means is an
analytical technique that, for a chosen value of k, identifies k clusters of objects based
on the objects’ proximity to the center of the k groups. The center is determined as the
arithmetic average (mean) of each cluster’s n-dimensional vector of attributes.
 PART B & C
1. Explain about k-means Clustering in detail.
Given a collection of objects each with n measurable attributes, k-means is an
analytical technique that, for a chosen value of k, identifies k clusters of objects based
on the objects’ proximity to the centre of the k groups. The centre is determined as the
arithmetic average (mean) of each cluster’s n-dimensional vector of attributes. This
section describes the algorithm to determine the k means as well as how best to apply
this technique to several use cases. Figure 4.1 illustrates three clusters of objects with
two attributes. Each object in the dataset is represented by a small dot color-coded to
the closest large dot, the mean of the cluster.
Usage
Medical
Patient attributes such as age, height, weight, systolic and diastolic blood pressures,
cholesterol level, and other attributes can identify naturally occurring clusters. These
clusters could be used to target individuals for specific preventive measures or clinical
trial participation. Clustering, in general, is useful in biology for the classification of
plants and animals as well as in the field of human genetics.
Customer Segmentation
Marketing and sales groups use k-means to better identify customers who have similar
behaviors and spending patterns. For example, a wireless provider may look at the
following customer attributes: monthly bill, number of text messages, data volume
consumed, minutes used during various daily periods, and years as a customer. The
wireless company could then look at the naturally occurring clusters and consider
tactics to increase sales or reduce the customer churn rate, the proportion of customers
who end their relationship with a particular company.
Image Processing
Video is one example of the growing volumes of unstructured data being collected.
Within each frame of a video, k-means analysis can be used to identify objects in the
video. For each frame, the task is to determine which pixels are most similar to each
other. The attributes of each pixel can include brightness, color, and location, the x
and y coordinates in the frame. With security video images, for example, successive
frames are examined to identify any changes to the clusters. These newly identified
clusters may indicate unauthorized access to a facility.
Overview
To illustrate the method to find k clusters from a collection of M objects with n
attributes, the two-dimensional case (n = 2) is examined. It is much easier to visualize
the k-means method in two dimensions
Because each object in this example has two attributes, it is useful to consider each
object corresponding to the point , where x and y denote the two attributes and i = 1, 2
… M. For a given cluster of m points (m M), the point that corresponds to the
cluster’s mean is called a centroid. In mathematics, a centroid refers to a point that
corresponds to the center of mass for an object.
The k-means algorithm to find k clusters can be described in the following four steps.
1. Choose the value of k and the k initial guesses for the centroids.
2. Compute the distance from each data point(xi,yi) to each centroid. Assign each point to the
closest centroid. This association defines the first k clusters.
3. Compute the centroid, the center of mass, of each newly defined cluster from Step 2.
4. Repeat Steps 2 and 3 until the algorithm converges to an answer.
1. Assign each point to the closest centroid computed in Step 3.
2. Compute the centroid of newly defined clusters.
3. Repeat until the algorithm reaches the final answer.

2. Explain about Classification of Decision trees in detail.

A decision tree (also called prediction tree) uses a tree structure to specify sequences
of decisions and consequences. Given input , the goal is to predict a response or output
variable . Each member of the set is called an input variable. The prediction can be
achieved by constructing a decision tree with test points and branches. At each test
point, a decision is made to pick a specific branch and traverse down the tree.

Eventually, a final point is reached, and a prediction can be made. Each test point in a
decision tree involves testing a particular input variable (or attribute), and each branch
represents the decision being made. Due to its flexibility and easy visualization,
decision trees are commonly deployed in data mining applications for classification
purposes.

The input values of a decision tree can be categorical or continuous. A decision tree
employs a structure of test points (called nodes) and branches, which represent the
decision being made. A node without further branches is called a leaf node. The leaf
nodes return class labels and, in some implementations, they return the probability
scores. A decision tree can be converted into a set of decision rules. In the following
example rule, income and mortgage_amount are input variables, and the response is
the output variable default with a probability score.

IF income < $50,000 AND mortgage_amount > $100K

THEN default = True WITH PROBABILITY 75%

Decision trees have two varieties: classification trees and regression trees.
Classification trees usually apply to output variables that are categorical—often binary
—in nature, such as yes or no, purchase or not purchase, and so on. Regression trees,
on the other hand, can apply to output variables that are numeric or continuous,
such as the predicted price of a consumer good or the likelihood a subscription will be
purchased.

Decision trees can be applied to a variety of situations. They can be easily represented
in a visual way, and the corresponding decision rules are quite straightforward.
Additionally, because the result is a series of logical if-then statements, there is no
underlying assumption of a linear (or nonlinear) relationship between the input
variables and the response variable.

The term branch refers to the outcome of a decision and is visualized as a line
connecting two nodes. If a decision is numerical, the “greater than” branch is usually
placed on the right, and the “less than” branch is placed on the left. Depending on the
nature of the variable, one of the branches may need to include an “equal to”
component.

Internal nodes are the decision or test points. Each internal node refers to an input
variable or an attribute. The top internal node is called the root. The decision tree in
Figure is a binary tree in that each internal node has no more than two branches. The
branching of a node is referred to as a split.

Sometimes decision trees may have more than two branches stemming from a node.
For example, if an input variable Weather is categorical and has three choices—
Sunny, Rainy, and Snowy—the corresponding node Weather in the decision tree may
have three branches labelled as Sunny, Rainy, and Snowy, respectively.

The depth of a node is the minimum number of steps required to reach the node from
the root. In Figure for example, nodes Income and Age have a depth of one, and the
four nodes on the bottom of the tree have a depth of two.

Leaf nodes are at the end of the last branches on the tree. They represent class labels
— the outcome of all the prior decisions. The path from the root to a leaf node
contains a series of decisions made at various internal nodes.

In Figure the root node splits into two branches with a Gender test. The right branch
contains all those records with the variable Gender equal to Male, and the left branch
contains all those records with the variable Gender equal to Female to create the depth
1 internal nodes. Each internal node effectively acts as the root of a subtree, and a best
test for each node is determined independently of the other internal nodes. The left-
hand side (LHS) internal node splits on a question based on the Income variable to
create leaf nodes at depth 2, whereas the right-hand side (RHS) splits on a question on
the Age variable.

The decision tree shows that females with income less than or equal to $45,000 and
males 40 years old or younger are classified as people who would purchase the
product. In traversing this tree, age does not matter for females, and income does not
matter for males.

Decision trees are widely used in practice. For example, to classify animals, questions
(like cold-blooded or warm-blooded, mammal or not mammal) are answered to arrive
at a certain classification. Another example is a checklist of symptoms during a
doctor’s evaluation of a patient. The artificial intelligence engine of a video game
commonly uses decision trees to control the autonomous actions of a character in
response to various scenarios. Retailers can use decision trees to segment
customers or predict response rates to marketing and promotions. Financial
institutions can use decision trees to help decide if a loan application should be
approved or denied. In the case of loan approval, computers can use the logical if-
then statements to predict whether the customer will default on the loan. For
customers with a clear (strong) outcome, no human interaction is required; for
observations that may not generate a clear response, a human is needed for the
decision.

By limiting the number of splits, a short tree can be created. Short trees are often used
as components (also called weak learners or base learners) in ensemble methods.
Ensemble methods use multiple predictive models to vote, and decisions can be made
based on the combination of the votes. Some popular ensemble methods include
random forest [4], bagging, and boosting [5]. Section 7.4 discusses these ensemble
methods more.
The simplest short tree is called a decision stump, which is a decision tree with the
root immediately connected to the leaf nodes. A decision stump makes a prediction
based on the value of just a single input variable.
3. Explain in detail about Naïve Bayes Classification.

Naïve Bayes is a probabilistic classification method based on Bayes’ theorem (or

Bayes’ law) with a few tweaks. Bayes’ theorem gives the relationship between the
probabilities of two events and their conditional probabilities.

A naïve Bayes classifier assumes that the presence or absence of a particular feature of
a class is unrelated to the presence or absence of other features. For example, an
object can be classified based on its attributes such as shape, color, and weight. A
reasonable classification for an object that is spherical, yellow, and less than 60 grams
in weight may be a tennis ball. Even if these features depend on each other or upon the
existence of the other features, a naïve Bayes classifier considers all these properties
to contribute independently to the probability that the object is a tennis ball.

The input variables are generally categorical, but variations of the algorithm can
accept continuous variables. There are also ways to convert continuous variables into
categorical ones. This process is often referred to as the discretization of continuous
variables. In the tennis ball example, a continuous variable such as weight can be
grouped into intervals to be converted into a categorical variable. For an attribute such
as income, the attribute can be converted into categorical values as shown below.

Low Income: income < $10,000

Working Class: $10,000 ≤ income < $50,000
Middle Class: $50,000 ≤ income < $1,000,000
Upper Class: income ≥ $1,000,000

The conditional probability of event C occurring, given that event A has already
occurred, is denoted as , which can be found using the formula in Equation

Equation can be obtained with some minor algebra and substitution of the conditional
probability:

where C is the class label and A is the observed attributes .

Equation is the most common form of the Bayes’ theorem.

Mathematically, Bayes’ theorem gives the relationship between the probabilities of C

and A, and , and the conditional probabilities of C given A and A given C, namely and
Bayes’ theorem is significant because quite often is much more difficult to compute
than and from the training data. By using Bayes’ theorem, this problem can be
circumvented.
An example better illustrates the use of Bayes’ theorem. John flies frequently and
likes to upgrade his seat to first class. He has determined that if he checks in for his
flight at least two hours early, the probability that he will get an upgrade is 0.75;
otherwise, the probability that he will get an upgrade is 0.35. With his busy schedule,
he checks in at least two hours before his flight only 40% of the time. Suppose John
did not receive an upgrade on his most recent attempt.
What is the probability that he did not arrive two hours early?
Let C = {John arrived at least two hours early}, and A = {John received an upgrade},
then ¬C = {John did not arrive two hours early}, and ¬A = {John did not receive an
upgrade}.

John checked in at least two hours early only 40% of the time, or . Therefore,
The probability that John received an upgrade given that he checked in early is 0.75, or
.
The probability that John received an upgrade given that he did not arrive two hours
early is 0.35, or. Therefore, the probability that John received an upgrade can be
computed as shown in Equation

Thus, the probability that John did not receive an upgrade. Using Bayes’ theorem, the
probability that John did not arrive two hours early given that he did not receive his
upgrade is shown in Equation
Another example involves computing the probability that a patient carries a disease
based on the result of a lab test. Assume that a patient named Mary took a lab test for
a certain disease and the result came back positive. The test returns a positive result in
95% of the cases in which the disease is actually present, and it returns a positive
result in 6% of the cases in which the disease is not present. Furthermore, 1% of the
entire population has this disease. What is the probability that Mary actually has the
disease, given that the test is positive?
Let C = {having the disease} and A = {testing positive}. The goal is to solve the
probability of having the disease, given that Mary has a positive test result, . From the
problem description, and. Bayes’ theorem defines. The probability of testing positive,
that is, needs to be computed first. That computation is shown in Equation
According to Bayes’ theorem, the probability of having the disease, given that Mary
has a positive test result, is shown in Equation.

That means that the probability of Mary actually having the disease given a positive
test result is only 13.79%. This result indicates that the lab test may not be a good one.
The likelihood of having the disease was 1% when the patient walked in the door and
only 13.79% when the patient walked out, which would suggest further tests.

A more general form of Bayes’ theorem assigns a classified label to an object with
multiple attributes such that the label corresponds to the largest value of. he
probability that a set of attribute values (composed of variables) should be labelled
with a classification label equals the probability that the set of variables given is true,
times the probability of divided by the probability of. Mathematically, this is shown in
Equation.

Consider the bank marketing example presented in Section 7.1 on predicting if a

customer would subscribe to a term deposit. Let be a list of attributes {job, marital,
education, default, housing, loan, contact, pout come}.
4. How evaluation is performed on decision trees?

Decision trees use greedy algorithms, in that they always choose the option that seems
the best available at that moment. At each step, the algorithm selects which attribute to
use for splitting the remaining records. This selection may not be the best overall, but it
is guaranteed to be the best at that step. This characteristic reinforces the efficiency of
decision trees. However, once a bad split is taken, it is propagated through the rest of
the tree. To address this problem, an ensemble technique (such as random forest) may
randomize the splitting or even randomize data and come up with a multiple tree
structure. These trees then vote for each class, and the class with the most votes is
chosen as the predicted class

There are a few ways to evaluate a decision tree. First, evaluate whether the splits of
the tree make sense. Conduct sanity checks by validating the decision rules with
domain experts, and determine if the decision rules are sound.

Next, look at the depth and nodes of the tree. Having too many layers and obtaining
nodes with few members might be signs of overfitting. In overfitting, the model fits
the training set well, but it performs poorly on the new samples in the testing set.
Figure
7.7 illustrates the performance of an overfit model. The x-axis represents the amount
of data, and the yaxis represents the errors. The blue curve is the training set, and the
red curve is the testing set. The left side of the gray vertical line shows that the model
predicts well on the testing set. But on the right side of the gray line, the model
performs worse and worse on the testing set as more and more unseen data is
introduced.

For decision tree learning, overfitting can be caused by either the lack of training data
or the biased data in the training set. Two approaches [10] can help avoid overfitting
in decision tree learning.
Stop growing the tree early before it reaches the point where all the training data is
perfectly classified. Grow the full tree, and then post-prune the tree with methods such
as reduced-error pruning and rule-based post pruning.
Last, many standard diagnostics tools that apply to classifiers can help evaluate
overfitting. These tools are further discussed in Section 7.3.

Decision trees are computationally inexpensive, and it is easy to classify the data. The
outputs are easy to interpret as a fixed sequence of simple tests. Many decision tree
algorithms are able to show the importance of each input variable. Basic measures,
such as information gain, are provided by most statistical software packages.

Decision trees are able to handle both numerical and categorical attributes and are
robust with redundant or correlated variables. Decision trees can handle categorical
attributes with many distinct values, such as country codes for telephone numbers.
Decision trees can also handle variables that have a nonlinear effect on the outcome,
so they work better than linear models (for example, linear regression and logistic
regression) for highly nonlinear problems. Decision trees naturally handle variable
interactions. Every node in the tree depends on the preceding nodes in the tree.

In a decision tree, the decision regions are rectangular surfaces. Figure 7.8 shows an
example of five rectangular decision surfaces (A, B, C, D, and E) defined by four
values— —of two attributes (and). The corresponding decision tree is on the right side
of the figure. A decision surface corresponds to a leaf node of the tree, and it can be
reached by traversing from the root of the tree following by a series of decisions
according to the value of an attribute. The decision surface can only be axis-aligned
for the decision tree.

The structure of a decision tree is sensitive to small variations in the training data.
Although the dataset is the same, constructing two decision trees based on two different
subsets may result in very different trees. If a tree is too deep, overfitting may occur,
because each split reduces the training data for subsequent splits.
Decision trees are not a good choice if the dataset contains many irrelevant variables.
This is different from the notion that they are robust with redundant variables and
correlated variables. If the dataset contains redundant variables, the resulting decision
tree ignores all but one of these variables because the algorithm cannot detect
information gain by including more redundant variables. On the other hand, if the
dataset contains irrelevant variables and if these variables are accidentally chosen as
splits in the tree, the tree may grow too large and may end up with less data at every
split, where overfitting is likely to occur. To address this problem, feature selection
can be introduced in the data pre-processing phase to eliminate the irrelevant
variables.

Although decision trees are able to handle correlated variables, decision trees are not
well suited when most of the variables in the training set are correlated, since
overfitting is likely to occur. To overcome the issue of instability and potential
overfitting of deep trees, one can combine the decisions of several randomized
shallow decision trees—the basic idea of another classifier called random forest [4]—
or use ensemble methods to combine several weak learners for better classification.
These methods have been shown to improve predictive power compared to a single
decision tree.

For binary decisions, a decision tree works better if the training dataset consists of
records with an even probability of each result. In other words, the root of the tree has
a 50% chance of either classification. This occurs by randomly selecting training
records from each possible classification in equal numbers. It counteracts the
likelihood that a tree will stump out early by-passing purity tests because of bias in the
training data.

When using methods such as logistic regression on a dataset with many variables,
decision trees can help determine which variables are the most useful to select based
on information gain. Then these variables can be selected for the logistic regression.
Decision trees can also be used to prune redundant variables.
 CS8091 BIG DATA ANALYTICS
UNIT III ASSOCIATION AND RECOMMENDATION SYSTEM
QUESTION BANK

PART-A
1. What are Recommenders?
• Recommenders are instances of personalization software.
• Personalization concerns adapting to the individual needs, interests, and preferences of
each user.
Includes:
– Recommending
– Filtering
– Predicting (e.g. form or calendar appt. completion)
From a business perspective, it is viewed as part of Customer Relationship Management
(CRM).
2. What is Dimensionality Reduction?
Dimension Reduction refers to:
– The process of converting a set of data having vast dimensions into data with lesser
dimensions ensuring that it conveys similar information concisely.
– These techniques are typically used while solving machine learning problems to
obtain better features for a classification or regression task.
3. List out the problems on using Recommendation systems
• Inconclusive user feedback forms
• Finding users to take the feedback surveys
• Weak Algorithms
• Poor results
• Poor Data
• Lack of Data
• Privacy Control (May NOT explicitly collaborate with recipients)
4. List out the types of Recommender Systems.
– Content
 – Collaborative
– Knowledge
5. What is Association Mining?
Finding frequent patterns, associations, correlations, or causal structures among sets
of items or objects in transaction databases, relational databases, and other information
repositories.
6. What is the Purpose of Apriori Algorithm?
Apriori algorithm is an influential algorithm for mining frequent item sets for
Boolean association rules. The name of the algorithm is based on the fact that the
algorithm uses prior knowledge of frequent item set properties.
7. List out the applications of Association rules.
– Basket data analysis,
– cross-marketing,
– catalogue design,
– loss-leader analysis,
– clustering,
– classification
8. Define support and confidence in Association rule mining.
Support S is the percentage of transactions in D that contain AUB.
Confidence c is the percentage of transactions in D containing A that also contain B.
Support (A=>B) = P(AUB)
Confidence (A=>B) =P(B/A)
9. What is Association rule?
Association rule finds interesting association or correlation relationships among a large set
of data items, which is used for decision-making processes. Association rules analyses
buying patterns that are frequently associated or purchased together.
10. Describe the method of generating frequent item sets without candidate generation.
Frequent-pattern growth(or FP Growth) adopts divide-and-conquer strategy.
Steps:
– Compress the database representing frequent items into a frequent pattern tree or FP
tree
– Divide the compressed database into a set of conditional databases
– Mine each conditional database separately
 PART B & C
1. Explain about the basics of Recommendation Systems
A Common Challenge:
– Assume you’re a company selling items of some sort: movies, songs, products, etc.
– Company collects millions of ratings from users of their items
– To maximize profit / user happiness, you want to recommend items that users are
likely to want
Recommender systems
• Systems for recommending items (e.g. books, movies, CD’s, web pages, newsgroup
messages) to users based on examples of their preferences.
• Many websites provide recommendations (e.g. Amazon, NetFlix, Pandora).
• Recommenders have been shown to substantially increase sales at on-line stores.
• Recommender systems are a technological proxy for a social process.
• Recommender systems are a way of suggesting like or similar items and ideas to a
users specific way of thinking.
• Recommender systems try to automate aspects of a completely different
information discovery model where people try to find other people with similar
tastes and then ask them to suggest new things.
Motivation for Recommender Systems
Automates quotes like:
–"I like this book; you might be interested in it"
–"I saw this movie, you’ll like it“
–"Don’t go see that movie!"
Usage
• Massive E-commerce sites use this tool to suggest other items a consumer may
want to purchase
• Web personalization
Ways its used
• Survey’s filled out by past users for the use of new users
• Search-style Algorithms
• Genre matching
• Past purchase querying
Problems on using Recommendation System
• Inconclusive user feedback forms
• Finding users to take the feedback surveys
• Weak Algorithms
• Poor results
• Poor Data
• Lack of Data
• Privacy Control (May NOT explicitly collaborate with recipients)
Maintenance
• Costly
• Information becomes outdated
• Information quantity (large, disk space expansion)
The Future of Recommender Systems
• Extract implicit negative ratings through the analysis of returned item.
• How to integrate community with recommendations
• Recommender systems will be used in the future to predict demand for products,
enabling earlier communication back the supply chain.
2. Explain content-based filtering in detail.
CONTENT-BASED RECOMMENDATIONS
• Main idea: Recommend items to customer x similar to previous items rated highly by x
Example:
•Movie recommendations
–Recommend movies with same actor(s), director, genre, …
•Websites, blogs, news
–Recommend other sites with “similar” content
Item Profiles
• For each item, create an item profile
• Profile is a set (vector) of features
o Movies: author, title, actor, director,…
o Text: Set of “important” words in document
• How to pick important features?
o Usual heuristic from text mining is TF-IDF
(Term frequency * Inverse Doc Frequency)
• Term … Feature
• Document … Item
• fij = frequency of term (feature) i in doc (item) j
• ni = number of docs that mention term i
• N = total number of docs
• TF-IDF score: wij = TFij × IDFi
• Doc profile = set of words with highest TF-IDF scores, together with their scores
User Profiles and Prediction
Discovering Features of Documents
• There are many kinds of documents for which a recommendation system can be
useful. For example, there are many news articles published each day, and we
cannot read all of them.
• A recommendation system can suggest articles on topics a user is interested in, but
• how can we distinguish among topics?
• Web pages are also a collection of documents. Can we suggest pages a user might
want to see?
 • Likewise, blogs could be recommended to interested users, if we could classify
blogs by topics.
• Unfortunately, these classes of documents do not tend to have readily available
information giving features.
• A substitute that has been useful in practice is the identification of words that
characterize the topic of a document.
• First, eliminate stop words – the several hundred most common words, which tend
to say little about the topic of a document.
• For the remaining words, compute the TF.IDF score for each word in the document.
The ones with the highest scores are the words that characterize the document.
Content-Based Recommenders
• Find me things that I liked in the past.
• Machine learns preferences through user feedback and builds a user profile
• Explicit feedback – user rates items
• Implicit feedback – system records user activity
– Clicksteam data classified according to page category and activity, e.g. browsing a
product page
– Time spent on an activity such as browsing a page
• Recommendation is viewed as a search process, with the user profile acting as the
query and the set of items acting as the documents to match.
Recommending Items to Users Based on Content
• With profile vectors for both users and items, we can estimate the degree to which a
user would prefer an item by computing the cosine distance between the user’s and
item’s vectors.
• As in Example 9.2, we may wish to scale var- ious components whose values
are not boolean.
• The random-hyperplane and locality-sensitive-hashing techniques can be used to
place (just) item profiles in buckets.
• In that way, given a user to whom we want to recommend some items, we can
apply the same two techniques – random hyperplanes and LSH – to determine in
which buckets we must look for items that might have a small cosine distance from
the user.
Pros: Content-based Approach
• +: No need for data on other users
– No cold-start or sparsity problems
• +: Able to recommend to users with unique tastes
• +: Able to recommend new & unpopular items
– No first-rater problem
• +: Able to provide explanations
– Can provide explanations of recommended items by listing content-features that
caused an item to be recommended
Cons: Content-based Approach
• –: Finding the appropriate features is hard
– E.g., images, movies, music
• –: Recommendations for new users
– How to build a user profile?
• –: Overspecialization
– Never recommends items outside user’s content profile
– People might have multiple interests
– Unable to exploit quality judgments of other users
3. Explain about Collaborative Filtering in detail.
Introduction u to Collaborative Filtering
• Collaborative filtering leverages product transactions to give recommendations.
• In this type of model, for a specific customer,
– we find similar customers based on transaction history and recommend items that
the customer in question hasn’t purchased yet and which the similar customers
tended to like.
Collaborative Filtering
• Match people with similar interests as a basis for recommendation.
1) Many people must participate to make it likely that a person with similar interests
will be found.
2) There must be a simple way for people to express their interests.
3) There must be an efficient algorithm to match people with similar interests.
Designing Collaborative Filtering

• The standard approach to carry out collaborative filtering is non-negative matrix

factorization (NMF).
• We first construct the sparse interaction matrix I which has customers in its rows
and products in its columns.
• We then try to decompose I to a product of two matrices C and P^T.
• Here, C is the customer matrix, wherein each row is a customer and each column is
the affinity of the customer to the latent feature discovered by the NMF.
• Similarly, P is the product matrix, wherein each row is a product and each column
is the extent the product embodies the latent feature.
• These latent features are discovered by the NMF procedure.
• It is up to the modeler to decide how many latent features you want for the
factorization.
• For example, suppose that we want 2 latent features in our movie recommendation
engine.
• Latent feature discovered by NMF could be if whether the movie is a horror movie
(that’s latent feature one) and whether the movie is a romance movie (latent feature
two).
• A row of C then represents the customer’s affinity to horror and romance, while a
row of P represents the extent the movie belongs to horror and romance.
• Similar to content-based systems, we can measure the similarity of these two
vectors with cosine similarity to infer how much each customer likes each movie.
Using that information, we can recommend movies to users.
• Consider user x
• Find set N of other users whose ratings are “similar” to x’s ratings
• Estimate x’s ratings based on ratings of users in N
• Users rate items – user interests recorded. Ratings may be:
– Explicit, e.g. buying or rating an item
– Implicit, e.g. browsing time, no. of mouse clicks
• Nearest neighbour matching used to find people with similar interests
• Items that neighbours rate highly but that you have not rated are recommended to
you
• User can then rate recommended items
Observations
• Can construct a vector for each user (where 0 implies an item is unrated)
– E.g. for Alex: <1,0,5,4>
– E.g. for Peter <0,0,4,5>
• On average, user vectors are sparse, since users rate (or buy) only a few items.
• Vector similarity or correlation can be used to find nearest neighbour.
– E.g. Alex closest to Peter, then to George.
Challenges for CF
• Sparsity problem – when many of the items have not been rated by many people, it
may be hard to find ‘like minded’ people.
• First rater problem – what happens if an item has not been rated by anyone.
• Privacy problems.
• Can combine CF with CB recommenders
– Use CB approach to score some unrated items.
– Then use CF for recommendations.
• Serendipity - recommend to me something I do not know already
– Oxford dictionary: the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy
or beneficial way.
4. Explain in detail about Apriori Algorithm.
• Find all itemsets that have minimum support (frequent itemsets, also called
large itemsets).
• Use frequent itemsets to generate rules.

E.g., a frequent itemset

{Chicken, Clothes, Milk} [sup = 3/7]
and one rule from the frequent itemset
Clothes  Milk, Chicken [sup = 3/7, conf = 3/3]

Step 1: Mining all frequent itemsets

• A frequent itemset is an itemset whose support is ≥ minsup.
• Key idea: The apriori property (downward closure property): any subsets of a frequent
itemset are also frequent itemsets
The Algorithm
• Iterative algo. (also called level-wise search): Find all 1-item frequent itemsets; then all
2-item frequent itemsets, and so on.
 In each iteration k, only consider itemsets that contain some k-1 frequent itemset.
• Find frequent itemsets of size 1: F1
• From k = 2
 Ck = candidates of size k: those itemsets of size k that could be frequent, given Fk-
1
 Fk = those itemsets that are actually frequent, Fk  Ck (need to scan the
database once).
• Single dimensional, single-level, Boolean frequent item sets
• Finding frequent item sets using candidate generation
• Generating association rules from frequent item sets
• Using the downward closure, we can prune unnecessary branches for further consideration

APRIORI
k=1
o Find frequent set Lk from Ck of all candidate itemsets
o Form Ck+1 from Lk; k = k + 1
o Repeat 2-3 until Ck is empty
• Details about steps 2 and 3
o Step 2: scan D and count each itemset in Ck , if it’s greater than minSup, it is frequent
o Step 3: next slide

Apriori’s Candidate Generation

• For k=1, C1 = all 1-itemsets.
• For k>1, generate Ck from Lk-1 as follows:
– The join step
Ck = k-2 way join of Lk-1 with itself
If both {a1, …,ak-2, ak-1} & {a1, …, ak-2, ak} are in Lk-1, then add {a1, …,ak-2, ak-1, ak}
to Ck
(We keep items sorted).
– The prune step
Remove {a1, …,ak-2, ak-1, ak} if it contains a non-frequent (k-1) subset
The Apriori principle:
• Any subset of a frequent itemset must be frequent
• Join Step
Ck is generated by joining Lk-1with itself
• Prune Step
Any (k-1)-itemset that is not frequent cannot be a subset of a frequent k-itemset

How to Generate Candidates?

Suppose the items in Lk-1 are listed in an order

Step 1: self-joining Lk-1

insert into Ck
select p.item1, p.item2, …, p.itemk-1, q.itemk-1
from Lk-1 p, Lk-1 q
where p.item1=q.item1, …, p.itemk-2=q.itemk-2, p.itemk-1 < q.itemk-1
Step 2: pruning
forall itemsets c in Ck do
forall (k-1)-subsets s of c do
if (s is not in Lk-1) then delete c from Ck
Pseudo-code:
Ck: Candidate itemset of size k
Lk : frequent itemset of size k
L1 = {frequent items};
for (k = 1; Lk !=; k++) do begin
Ck+1 = candidates generated from
Lk; for each transaction t in
database do
increment the count of all candidates in Ck+1
that are contained in t
Lk+1 = candidates in Ck+1 with min_support
end
return k Lk;
Method:
– Let k=1
– Generate frequent itemsets of length 1
– Repeat until no new frequent itemsets are identified
 Generate length (k+1) candidate itemsets from length k frequent itemsets
 Prune candidate itemsets containing subsets of length k that are infrequent
 Count the support of each candidate by scanning the DB
 Eliminate candidates that are infrequent, leaving only those that are frequent
5. Explain Association Rules in detail.
Two-step approach:
1. Frequent Itemset Generation
– Generate all itemsets whose support  minsup
2. Rule Generation
--Generate high confidence rules from each frequent itemset, where each rule is a binary
partitioning of a frequent itemset
• Frequent itemset generation is still computationally expensive
Power set
• Given a set S, power set, P is the set of all subsets of S
• Known property of power sets
– If S has n number of elements, P will have N = 2n number of elements.
• Examples:
– For S = {}, P={{}}, N = 20 = 1
– For S = {Milk}, P={{}, {Milk}}, N=21=2
– For S = {Milk, Diaper}
– P={{},{Milk}, {Diaper}, {Milk, Diaper}}, N=22=4
– For S = {Milk, Diaper, Beer},
– P={{},{Milk}, {Diaper}, {Beer}, {Milk, Diaper}, {Diaper, Beer}, {Beer, Milk},
{Milk, Diaper, Beer}}, N=23=8
Example Association Rule
90% of transactions that purchase bread and butter also purchase milk
Antecedent: bread and butter
Consequent: milk
Confidence factor: 90%
Example Queries
• Find all the rules that have “Uludağ Gazozu” as consequent.
• Find all rules that have “Diet Coke” in the antecedent.
• Find all rules that have “sausage” in the antecedent and “mustard” in the consequent.
• Find all the rules relating items located on shelves A and B in the store.
• Find the “best” (most confident) k rules that have “Uludağ Gazozu” in the consequent.
Example:
I: itemset {cucumber, parsley, onion, tomato, salt, bread, olives, cheese, butter}
D: set of transactions
1 {{cucumber, parsley, onion, tomato, salt, bread},
2 {tomato, cucumber, parsley},
3 {tomato, cucumber, olives, onion, parsley},
4 {tomato, cucumber, onion, bread},
5 {tomato, salt, onion},
6 {bread, cheese}
7 {tomato, cheese, cucumber}
8 {bread, butter}}
Closed Item Set :
An itemset X is closed in a data set S if there exists no proper super-itemset5 Y such
that Y has the same support count as X in S. An itemset X is a closed frequent itemset
in set S if X is both closed and frequent in S.
Rule strength measures: Support and Confidence
Find all the rules X & Y Z with minimum confidence and support
– support, s, probability that a transaction contains {X Y Z}
– confidence, c, conditional probability that a transaction having {X Y} also
contains Z
Support
(absolute) support, or, support count of X: Frequency or occurrence of an itemset
X
(relative) support, s, is the fraction of transactions that contains X (i.e., the
probability that a transaction contains X)
An itemset X is frequent if X’s support is no less than a minsup threshold
Confidence (association rule: X Y )
sup(X Y)/sup(x) (conditional prob.: Pr(Y|X) = Pr(X^Y)/Pr(X) )
confidence, c, conditional probability that a transaction having X also contains Y
Find all the rules X Y with minimum support and confidence
sup(X Y) ≥ minsup
 sup(X Y)/sup(X) ≥ minconf
• Support: The rule holds with support sup in T (the transaction data set) if
sup% of transactions contain X Y.
sup = Pr(X Y)
• Confidence: The rule holds in T with confidence conf if conf% of
tranactions that contain X also contain Y.
 conf = Pr(Y | X)
• An association rule is a pattern that states when X occurs, Y occurs with
certain probability.
• support of X in D is count(X)/|D|
• For an association rule XY, we can calculate
– support (XY) = support (XY)
– confidence (XY) = support (XY)/support (X)
• Relate Support (S) and Confidence (C) to Joint and Conditional probabilities
• There could be exponentially many A-rules
• Interesting association rules are (for now) those whose S and C are greater than
minSup and minConf (some thresholds set by data miners)
Support count and Confidence
• Support count: The support count of an itemset X, denoted by X.count, in a data
set T is the number of transactions in T that contain X. Assume T has n
transactions.
• Then,
• How is it different from other algorithms
– Classification (supervised learning -> classifiers)
– Clustering (unsupervised learning -> clusters)
• Major steps in association rule mining
– Frequent itemsets generation
– Rule derivation
• Use of support and confidence in association mining
– S for frequent itemsets
– C for rule derivation