<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="static/style.xsl"?><OAI-PMH xmlns="http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/ http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/OAI-PMH.xsd"><responseDate>2026-09-19T06:53:26Z</responseDate><request verb="GetRecord" identifier="oai:repository.rice.edu:1911/88434" metadataPrefix="dim">https://repository.rice.edu/server/oai/request</request><GetRecord><record><header><identifier>oai:repository.rice.edu:1911/88434</identifier><datestamp>2024-01-11T20:57:04Z</datestamp><setSpec>com_1911_8299</setSpec><setSpec>col_1911_13110</setSpec></header><metadata><dim:dim xmlns:dim="http://www.dspace.org/xmlns/dspace/dim" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:doc="http://www.lyncode.com/xoai" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.dspace.org/xmlns/dspace/dim http://www.dspace.org/schema/dim.xsd">
   <dim:field mdschema="dc" element="contributor" qualifier="advisor">Jermaine, Chris</dim:field>
   <dim:field mdschema="dc" element="contributor" qualifier="committeeMember">Nakhleh, Luay</dim:field>
   <dim:field mdschema="dc" element="contributor" qualifier="committeeMember">Merényi, Erzsébet</dim:field>
   <dim:field mdschema="dc" element="creator">Pansare, Niketan</dim:field>
   <dim:field mdschema="dc" element="date" qualifier="accessioned">2016-02-05T22:13:49Z</dim:field>
   <dim:field mdschema="dc" element="date" qualifier="available">2016-02-05T22:13:49Z</dim:field>
   <dim:field mdschema="dc" element="date" qualifier="created">2014-12</dim:field>
   <dim:field mdschema="dc" element="date" qualifier="issued">2014-12-04</dim:field>
   <dim:field mdschema="dc" element="date" qualifier="submitted">December 2014</dim:field>
   <dim:field mdschema="dc" element="date" qualifier="updated">2016-02-05T22:13:49Z</dim:field>
   <dim:field mdschema="dc" element="identifier" qualifier="citation">Pansare, Niketan. &amp;quot;Large Scale Online Aggregation Via Distributed Systems.&amp;quot; (2014) Diss.,  Rice University.  &amp;lt;a href=&amp;quot;https://hdl.handle.net/1911/88434&amp;quot;&amp;gt;https://hdl.handle.net/1911/88434&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;.</dim:field>
   <dim:field mdschema="dc" element="identifier" qualifier="uri">https://hdl.handle.net/1911/88434</dim:field>
   <dim:field mdschema="dc" element="description" qualifier="abstract">From movie recommendations to fraud detection to personalized health care, there is growing need to analyze huge amounts of data quickly. To deal with huge  
amounts of data, many analysts use MapReduce, a software framework that parallelizes  computations across a compute cluster. However, due to the sheer volume of data, MapReduce is sometimes still not fast enough to perform complicated analysis.  In this thesis, I  address this problem by developing a statistical estimation framework on top of MapReduce  to provide for interactive data analysis.  I present three projects I have worked on  under this topic.

In the first project, I consider extending Online Aggregation (OLA) to a MapReduce environment. Online aggregation (OLA) allows the user to compute an arbitrary  
aggregation function over a data set and output probabilistic bounds on accuracy in online  fashion.  OLA in a relational database system uses classical  
sampling theory to estimate confidence bounds.  The key difference in a large-scale distributed   computing environment is the importance of block-based processing.  At a random time instance, the system is  likely processing blocks that take longer to process.  Hence blocks that take longer to  process are less likely to be taken into account when an estimate is generated. Since one might expect correlation between processing time and the aggregated value of a block, the estimates for the aggregate can be  
biased.  To address the inspection paradox, I propose a Bayesian model  that utilizes a joint prior over the values to be aggregated and time take to process/schedule  
each block.  Since the model is taking timing information into account, the bias is removed.  This model is  implemented on Hyracks, an open-source project
similar to Hadoop, the most popular implementation of MapReduce.

In the second project, I consider implementing gradient descent on top  of MapReduce.  Gradient descent is an optimization algorithm that   finds the local minima of
a function L(w) by starting with an initial point $w_0$ and then taking  steps in direction of negative gradient of the function to be optimized. The computation of
the gradient is referred to as an epoch and gradient descent computes  many epochs iteratively until completion.  If the number of data points N is very large it can  
take lot of time to compute the aggregate for an epoch k. Since the gradient descent algorithm is essentially a user-defined aggregate function, the OLA framework  
developed in the first part of my thesis can be used to speed up this algorithm in a  
MapReduce framework.
The key technical question that must be answered is “When do we stop  the OLA estimation for a given epoch?”.  In this thesis, I propose and evaluate a new  
statistical model for addressing this question

Finally, I design, implement, and evaluate a particular machine  
learning algorithm.  An extremely popular feature selection methodology
is topic modeling . A topic is defined as a probability distribution  over sets of words
or phrases and each document in the corpus is drawn from mixture of  
these topics. A topic model for a corpus specifies the set of topics, as well as the  
proportion in which
they are present in any given document.  The recent interest in topic  
models has been driven by the explosion of electronic, text based
data that are available for analysis. From web pages to emails to  
microblogs, text-based
data are everywhere. However, not all electronically-available natural  
language corpora are text-based. In my thesis, I consider the problem of learning  
topic models over
spoken language.  My work is motivated by our involvement with the  
Spoken Web (also called the World
Wide Telecomm Web), which allows users in rural India to post  
farming-related questions
and responses to an audio forum using mobile phones.  I propose a new  
topic model that leverages the statistical algorithms used
in most modern speech-to-text software.   I develop alternative  
version of the popular LDA topic model called the
spoken topic model, or STM for short. This model uses a Bayesian  
interpretation of the output of a speech-to-text software that takes  
into account the software&amp;apos;s explicit uncertainty description (the  
phrases and
weights) in a principled fashion.</dim:field>
   <dim:field mdschema="dc" element="format" qualifier="mimetype">application/pdf</dim:field>
   <dim:field mdschema="dc" element="language" qualifier="iso">eng</dim:field>
   <dim:field mdschema="dc" element="rights">Copyright is held by the author, unless otherwise indicated. Permission to reuse, publish, or reproduce the work beyond the bounds of fair use or other exemptions to copyright law must be obtained from the copyright holder.</dim:field>
   <dim:field mdschema="dc" element="subject">Online aggregation</dim:field>
   <dim:field mdschema="dc" element="subject">Gradient Descent</dim:field>
   <dim:field mdschema="dc" element="subject">MapReduce</dim:field>
   <dim:field mdschema="dc" element="subject">Hadoop</dim:field>
   <dim:field mdschema="dc" element="subject">Topic Models</dim:field>
   <dim:field mdschema="dc" element="title">Large Scale Online Aggregation Via Distributed Systems</dim:field>
   <dim:field mdschema="dc" element="type">Thesis</dim:field>
   <dim:field mdschema="dc" element="type" qualifier="material">Text</dim:field>
   <dim:field mdschema="thesis" element="degree" qualifier="department">Computer Science</dim:field>
   <dim:field mdschema="thesis" element="degree" qualifier="discipline">Engineering</dim:field>
   <dim:field mdschema="thesis" element="degree" qualifier="grantor">Rice University</dim:field>
   <dim:field mdschema="thesis" element="degree" qualifier="level">Doctoral</dim:field>
   <dim:field mdschema="thesis" element="degree" qualifier="name">Doctor of Philosophy</dim:field>
   <dim:field mdschema="others" element="access-status">open.access</dim:field>
</dim:dim>
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