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      Scalable Text Mining with Sparse Generative Models

      Puurula, Antti
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      Puurula, A. (2015). Scalable Text Mining with Sparse Generative Models (Thesis, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)). University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10289/9435
      Permanent Research Commons link: https://hdl.handle.net/10289/9435
      Abstract
      The information age has brought a deluge of data. Much of this is in text form, insurmountable in scope for humans and incomprehensible in structure for computers. Text mining is an expanding field of research that seeks to utilize the information contained in vast document collections. General data mining methods based on machine learning face challenges with the scale of text data, posing a need for scalable text mining methods.

      This thesis proposes a solution to scalable text mining: generative models combined with sparse computation. A unifying formalization for generative text models is defined, bringing together research traditions that have used formally equivalent models, but ignored parallel developments. This framework allows the use of methods developed in different processing tasks such as retrieval and classification, yielding effective solutions across different text mining tasks. Sparse computation using inverted indices is proposed for inference on probabilistic models. This reduces the computational complexity of the common text mining operations according to sparsity, yielding probabilistic models with the scalability of modern search engines.

      The proposed combination provides sparse generative models: a solution for text mining that is general, effective, and scalable. Extensive experimentation on text classification and ranked retrieval datasets are conducted, showing that the proposed solution matches or outperforms the leading task-specific methods in effectiveness, with a order of magnitude decrease in classification times for Wikipedia article categorization with a million classes. The developed methods were further applied in two 2014 Kaggle data mining prize competitions with over a hundred competing teams, earning first and second places.
      Date
      2015
      Type
      Thesis
      Degree Name
      Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
      Supervisors
      Witten, Ian H.
      Hunt, Lynette Anne
      Holmes, Geoffrey
      Publisher
      University of Waikato
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      All items in Research Commons are provided for private study and research purposes and are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated.
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      • Higher Degree Theses [1721]
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