Classification or Clustering Techniques Apply on Stack Exchange Data dump - cluster-analysis

I want to apply some clustering or classification techniques on Stack Exchange Data dump, But i don't know, how to do this ?
What data parameter i used for classification/clustering techniques?
How to extract those parameters from the data?
Is there any research paper that are published about "implementation of Classification or clustering techniques on Stack Exchange Data dump"?

The whole point about classification, clustering, data science and such in general is to try out different things.
So don't try to shortcut and get a prepared solution. The way is the solution, and you should really try to find your own way.

Related

Feature selection for one class classification

I try to apply One Class SVM but my dataset contains too many features and I believe feature selection would improve my metrics. Are there any methods for feature selection that do not need the label of the class?
If yes and you are aware of an existing implementation please let me know
You'd probably get better answers asking this on Cross Validated instead of Stack Exchange, although since you ask for implementations I will answer your question.
Unsupervised methods exist that allow you to eliminate features without looking at the target variable. This is called unsupervised data (dimensionality) reduction. They work by looking for features that convey similar information and then either eliminate some of those features or reduce them to fewer features whilst retaining as much information as possible.
Some examples of data reduction techniques include PCA, redundancy analysis, variable clustering, and random projections, amongst others.
You don't mention which program you're working in but I am going to presume it's Python. sklearn has implementations for PCA and SparseRandomProjection. I know there is a module designed for variable clustering in Python but I have not used it and don't know how convenient it is. I don't know if there's an unsupervised implementation of redundancy analysis in Python but you could consider making your own. Depending on what you decide to do it might not be too tricky (especially if you just do correlation based).
In case you're working in R, finding versions of data reduction using PCA will be no problem. For variable clustering and redundancy analysis, great packages like Hmisc and ClustOfVar exist.
You can also read about other unsupervised data reduction techniques; you might find other methods more suitable.

Best discriminatory method for 1d data with a lot of variance

I have a problem that I have tried to solve using Support Vector Machines (SVMs) to discriminate 1d series of data between two classes. One of the classes have very specific characteristics and are easily distinguishable from a human perspective, the only drawback is that the other class has data with a lot of variation from data sample to data sample, and it looks like it is not feasible to use this as a class at all. I'm only interested in discriminate between data that is from the class of interest (see image under) and all other "uninteresting" data. Then I tried implementing a one class SVM (OC-SVM), and it looks like it works okey but not as well as I had hoped. Therefore I started looking at alternatives, and came across one-class neural networks and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) as a possible solution. The Idea is that since the data points that I want to detect has a certain characteristic (see Image under) then an Adversarial network could preform well. I am very new to the field of neural networks and deep learning, so I wanted to ask the community if I am on to something before diving into it. Feel free to come up with alternative methods as well.
Ps: Unsupervised methods and clustering has not worked well solving this problem because of huge variations in the data.
Image of data of interest

Evaluation of user-based collaborative filtering K-Nearest Neighbor Algorithm

I was trying to find evaluation mechanisms of collaborative K-Nearest neighbor algorithm, but i am confused how can I evaluate this algorithm. How can I be sure that the recommendation done by this algorithm is correct or good. Actually I have also developed an algorithm that i want to compare with it. but i am not sure how can i compare and evaluate both of them. The data set used by me is of movie lens.
your people help on evaluating this recomender system will be highly appreciated.
Evaluating recommender systems is a large concern of its research and industry communities. Look at "Evaluating collaborative filtering recommender systems", a Herlocker et al paper. The people who publish MovieLens data (the GroupLens research lab at the University of Minnesota) also publish many papers on recsys topics, and the PDFs are often free at http://grouplens.org/publications/.
Check out https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=evaluating+recommender+systems.
In short, you should use a method that hides some data. You will train your model on a portion of the data (called "training data") and test on the remainder of the data that your model has never seen before. There's a formal way to do this called cross-validation, but the general concept of visible training data versus hidden test data is the most important.
I also recommend https://www.coursera.org/learn/recommender-systems, a Coursera course on recommender systems taught by GroupLens folks. In that course you'll learn to use LensKit, a recommender systems framework in Java that includes a large evaluation suite. Even if you don't take the course, LensKit may be just what you want.

Why we need training and test datasets in research?

I'm newbie in research area of data mining (text clustering) and i have couple question regarding to training and test datasets.
Is that clustering need training and testing datasets?
why we need to separate into training and test datasets?
Sorry for the rookie question hope expert in this group can help me.
As your question is on clustering:
In cluster analysis, there usually is no training or test data split.
Because you do cluster analysis when you do not have labels, so you cannot "train".
Training is a concept from machine learning, and train-test splitting is used to avoid overfitting.
But if you are not learning labels, you cannot overfit.
Properly used cluster analysis is a knowledge discovery method. You want to discover some new structure in your data, not rediscover something that is already labeled.
To train your data you need a sets of relevant data similar but not identical to your testing data. For example, you could split up your data where 0.7 of your data is training and the rest testing. This will allow your algorithm to get a feel for what it should be looking for. The rest of the data 0.3 can be used for testing as it is a distinct set of information (hopefully) which should allow the algorithm to test itself.
Why split it up?
Well if you train your data on data A and then test your algorithm on data A your algorithm will be able to identify all the information correctly because that is what it was trained on.
For example, if when learning addition you were given the sums 3+4, 4+5, 6+9, which you correctly solved it would be redundant to test your knowledge of addition using the same sums.
further information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing
http://www.nltk.org/book
Hope this helps.

Choose the right classification algorithm. Linear or non-linear? [closed]

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I find this question a little tricky. Maybe someone knows an approach to answer this question. Imagine that you have a dataset(training data) which you don't know what it is about. Which features of training data would you look at in order to infer classification algorithm to classify this data? Can we say anything whether we should use a non-linear or linear classification algorithm?
By the way, I am using WEKA to analyze the data.
Any suggestions?
Thank you.
This is in fact two questions in one ;-)
Feature selection
Linear or not
add "algorithm selection", and you probably have three most fundamental questions of classifier design.
As an aside note, it's a good thing that you do not have any domain expertise which would have allowed you to guide the selection of features and/or to assert the linearity of the feature space. That's the fun of data mining : to infer such info without a priori expertise. (BTW, and while domain expertise is good to double-check the outcome of the classifier, too much a priori insight may make you miss good mining opportunities). Without any such a priori knowledge you are forced to establish sound methodologies and apply careful scrutiny to the results.
It's hard to provide specific guidance, in part because many details are left out in the question, and also because I'm somewhat BS-ing my way through this ;-). Never the less I hope the following generic advice will be helpful
For each algorithm you try (or more precisely for each set of parameters for a given algorithm), you will need to run many tests. Theory can be very helpful, but there will remain a lot of "trial and error". You'll find Cross-Validation a valuable technique.
In a nutshell, [and depending on the size of the available training data], you randomly split the training data in several parts and train the classifier on one [or several] of these parts, and then evaluate the classifier on its performance on another [or several] parts. For each such run you measure various indicators of performance such as Mis-Classification Error (MCE) and aside from telling you how the classifier performs, these metrics, or rather their variability will provide hints as to the relevance of the features selected and/or their lack of scale or linearity.
Independently of the linearity assumption, it is useful to normalize the values of numeric features. This helps with features which have an odd range etc.
Within each dimension, establish the range within, say, 2.5 standard deviations on either side of the median, and convert the feature values to a percentage on the basis of this range.
Convert nominal attributes to binary ones, creating as many dimensions are there are distinct values of the nominal attribute. (I think many algorithm optimizers will do this for you)
Once you have identified one or a few classifiers with a relatively decent performance (say 33% MCE), perform the same test series, with such a classifier by modifying only one parameter at a time. For example remove some features, and see if the resulting, lower dimensionality classifier improves or degrades.
The loss factor is a very sensitive parameter. Try and stick with one "reasonnable" but possibly suboptimal value for the bulk of the tests, fine tune the loss at the end.
Learn to exploit the "dump" info provided by the SVM optimizers. These results provide very valuable info as to what the optimizer "thinks"
Remember that what worked very well wih a given dataset in a given domain may perform very poorly with data from another domain...
coffee's good, not too much. When all fails, make it Irish ;-)
Wow, so you have some training data and you don't know whether you are looking at features representing words in a document, or genese in a cell and need to tune a classifier. Well, since you don't have any semantic information, you are going to have to do this soley by looking at statistical properties of the data sets.
First, to formulate the problem, this is more than just linear vs non-linear. If you are really looking to classify this data, what you really need to do is to select a kernel function for the classifier which may be linear, or non-linear (gaussian, polynomial, hyperbolic, etc. In addition each kernel function may take one or more parameters that would need to be set. Determining an optimal kernel function and parameter set for a given classification problem is not really a solved problem, there are only useful heuristics and if you google 'selecting a kernel function' or 'choose kernel function', you will be treated to many research papers proposing and testing various approaches. While there are many approaches, one of the most basic and well travelled is to do a gradient descent on the parameters-- basically you try a kernel method and a parameter set , train on half your data points and see how you do. Then you try a different set of parameters and see how you do. You move the parameters in the direction of best improvement in accuracy until you get satisfactory results.
If you don't need to go through all this complexity to find a good kernel function, and simply want an answer to linear or non-linear. then the question mainly comes down to two things: Non linear classifiers will have a higher risk of overfitting (undergeneralizing) since they have more dimensions of freedom. They can suffer from the classifier merely memorizing sets of good data points, rather than coming up with a good generalization. On the other hand a linear classifier has less freedom to fit, and in the case of data that is not linearly seperable, will fail to find a good decision function and suffer from high error rates.
Unfortunately, I don't know a better mathematical solution to answer the question "is this data linearly seperable" other than to just try the classifier itself and see how it performs. For that you are going to need a smarter answer than mine.
Edit: This research paper describes an algorithm which looks like it should be able to determine how close a given data set comes to being linearly seperable.
http://www2.ift.ulaval.ca/~mmarchand/publications/wcnn93aa.pdf