1. Scalable Clustering on the Data Grid Patrick Wendel (pjw4@doc.ic.ac.uk) Moustafa Ghanem Yike Guo Discovery Net Department of Computing Imperial College, London

2. 20/09/2005All Hands Meeting, Nottingham Outline Discovery Net Data Clustering Mining Distributed Data Description of the strategy Deployment Evaluation Conclusions – Future Works

3. 20/09/2005All Hands Meeting, Nottingham Discovery Net Multidisciplinary project funded by the EPSRC under the UK e-Science programme (started Oct 2002, ended March 05) Developed an infrastructure for Knowledge Discovery Services for integrating and analysing data collected from high throughput devices and sensors Applications to: Life Sciences High throughput genomics and proteomics Real-time Environmental Monitoring High throughput dispersed air sensing technology Geo-Hazard modelling Earthquake modelling through satellite imagery The project covered many areas including infrastructure, applications and algorithms (text mining) Produced the Discovery Net platform which aims to integrate, compose, coordinate and deploy knowledge discovery services using a workflow technology.

4. 20/09/2005All Hands Meeting, Nottingham Discovery Net Using Distributed Computing Resources Scientific Information Scientific Discovery Literature Databases Operational Data Images Instrument Data  e-Science  large scale science that will increasingly be carried out through distributed global collaborations enabled by the Internet.

5. 20/09/2005All Hands Meeting, Nottingham Data Clustering We concentrate on a particular class of data mining algorithms: Clustering A class of explorative data mining techniques, used to find out groups of points that are similar/close to each other. Popular analysis technique. Useful for exploring, understanding, modelling large data sets Two main types of clustering: Hierarchical: Reorganises the data set into a hierarchy of clusters based on their similarity. Partition/Model based: Tries to partition the data set into a number of clusters or try to fit a statistical model (e.g. mixture of Gaussians) to a data set Successfully applied to sociological data, image processing and genomic data.

6. 20/09/2005All Hands Meeting, Nottingham Mining Data on the Grid Changing environment for data analysis: From analysing data files held locally (or close to the algorithm), to using remote data source, using remote services through portals, now towards distributed data executions. Distributed data sources: Data mining processes can now require data spread across multiple organisations Service-oriented approach: High-level functionalities are now available through well-defined services, instead of providing low-level (terminal etc..) access to resources

7. 20/09/2005All Hands Meeting, Nottingham Goal Design a service-oriented distributed data clustering strategy: that can be deployed on a Grid environment (i.e. a standard-based, service oriented, secure distributed environment) that would allow the end-user/data analysts to deploy easily against its own data sets

8. 20/09/2005All Hands Meeting, Nottingham Requirements 1/2 Performance issues: The analysis process using data grids directly and analysis services must be more efficient than gathering all the data on my desktop! Accuracy: The strategy should at least provide a model more representative of the overall data set Security The deployed strategy should ensure consistent handling of authentication and authorization aspects throughout Privacy: Restricted access to the data source

9. 20/09/2005All Hands Meeting, Nottingham Requirements 2/2 Heterogeneity of the resources used and/or connectivity It’s very unlikely the set of resources involved in the distributed analysis process will be similar or work over networks of similar bandwidth Loose-coupling between resources participating in the distributed analysis The analyst has less control on what is available/provided by each data grid or each analysis service. Therefore the framework should, as much as possible, be unaffected by minor differences between functionalities provided by each site. Service-oriented approach: The deployment of the analysis process should be based on the co-ordination of high-level services (instead of a dedicated distributed algorithm, e.g. MPI implementation)

10. 20/09/2005All Hands Meeting, Nottingham Current strategy We restrict the current framework to the case where instances are distributed but have the same attributes on each different fragments (~ horizontal fragments) Based on the EM-Clustering algorithm (mixture of Gaussian model fitting algorithm). Hierarchical clustering inherently complex to distribute Statistical approach of EM provides a sound basis to define a model combination strategy

11. 20/09/2005All Hands Meeting, Nottingham Approach Generate clustering models at each data source location (compute near the data) Transfer partial models in standard format (PMML) to a combiner site Normalise the relative weights of each model Perform an EM-based method on partial models to generate a global model.

12. 20/09/2005All Hands Meeting, Nottingham Combining Cluster Models Derived from the EM-Clustering algorithm itself Adapted to take as input the models generated at each site Each partial model is treated like a (very) compressed representation of the fragment (similar to the two step approaches of some scalable clustering algorithms). More detailed algorithm and formulae in proceedings

13. 20/09/2005All Hands Meeting, Nottingham Deployment: Discovery Net The Discovery Net platform is used to build and deploy this framework. Implementation based on an open architecture re-using common protocols and common infrastructure elements (such as the Globus Toolkits). It also defines its own protocol for workflows, Discovery Process Markup Language (DPML) which allows the definition of data analysis workflows to be executed on distributed resources. The platform comprises a server that stores, schedules the workflows and manage the data, and a thick client to help the workflow construction process. Thus giving the end user the ability to define application-specific workflows performing such tasks as distributed data mining. The model combiner is implemented as a workflow activity in Discovery Net

14. 20/09/2005All Hands Meeting, Nottingham Deployment Data sourcesDiscovery Net servers Partial clustering PMML Partial models Global model Combiner site Source A Source B Source C

15. 20/09/2005All Hands Meeting, Nottingham Deployment: Workflow The Discovery Net client enables the composition and the execution of the distributed process as a workflow constructed visually. The execution engine will coordinate the distributed execution

16. 20/09/2005All Hands Meeting, Nottingham Accuracy Evaluation: Data Distribution Comparison of the accuracy of the combined model with the average accuracy of partial models against the entire data sets (i.e. have we gained some accuracy by considering the fragments together) Accuracy will strongly depend on how the data is distributed among different sites. In the evaluation we introduce a randomness ratio to determine how similar the data distribution is among fragments. 0 meaning that each site would have data drawn from different distributions 1 meaning that the data from all fragments are drawn from the same distribution Measured by log-likelihood function of the test data set: The likelihood function of a data set represents how much that data is likely to be following the distribution function defined by the model

17. 20/09/2005All Hands Meeting, Nottingham Accuracy Evaluation: Data distribution As expected, the ratio has a huge effect on gained accuracy. For low levels, each fragment becomes less and less representative of the complete data set, therefore the combined model will outperform partial ones.

18. 20/09/2005All Hands Meeting, Nottingham Accuracy Evaluation: Number of fragments (r= 0.2, 10,000 points, 5 clusters) The accuracy does degrade with increasing number of fragments, but so does the average accuracy of models generated from individual fragments.

19. 20/09/2005All Hands Meeting, Nottingham Accuracy Evaluation: Increasing data size (r=0.2,d=5,5 fragments). Consistent behaviour of the combined model’s accuracy over partial ones.

20. 20/09/2005All Hands Meeting, Nottingham Performance Evaluation Performance evaluation is only partially relevant, as the process does not feed back combined models and partial models are generated near the data. The heterogeneity of real deployments is difficult to take into account. Time in seconds, for an increasing number of fragments

21. 20/09/2005All Hands Meeting, Nottingham Performance Evaluation Execution time with lower dimensionality and larger data sets

22. 20/09/2005All Hands Meeting, Nottingham Conclusions Encouraging results in terms of accuracy vs. performance, given the constraints. But is the trade-off between accuracy and flexibility (generally the case in distributed data mining) acceptable? This should be part of a wider explorative process, probably as a first step into the understanding of the data set. Being part of the Discovery Net platform, the distributed analysis process can be simply designed from the Discovery Net client software.

23. 20/09/2005All Hands Meeting, Nottingham Future Works First step towards more generic distributed data mining strategies (classification algorithms, association rules) Need evaluation against real data sets ! Possible improvements including: Refinement through feedback Use of a more complex intermediate summary structure for the partial models (e.g. tree structures containing summary information) Estimation of the number of clusters (using Bayesian Information Criteria) Plenty of possible clustering algorithms to try to use.

24. 20/09/2005All Hands Meeting, Nottingham Questions?