Are there different types of queries? - database

Linear queries (or linear aggregation queries) are of the form q=(q1,q2...) , where q is a real values vector and one gets the results of the query on a value 'x' by the process of a vector product as qx = q1x1+q2x2+...
Are there any other types of queries that can be classified like this?

Related

Efficient data storage for large matrix of tabular data

I have a large matrix of RNA expression data (~5gb uncompressed). Patient id's across the columns, each row is a particular gene, and values are relative log expression (floats, can be positive or negative).
gene
patient-1
patient-2
patient-3
...
tp53
1.3483
3.2842
-1.8482
...
brca
4.3483
2.2842
-3.83282
...
...
...
...
...
...
Matrix size is ~ 60k rows x 20k columns. I would like to find an efficient storage & partitioning scheme to allow for on-demand retrieval of n rows x m columns. For example, use cases such as
fetch [gene-1, gene-53, gene-833] for [patient-32, patient-1888, patient-2039] (9 datum).
fetch [gene-1, gene-53, gene-833] for ALL patients (~60k datum).
Unstacking the frame and writing to relational DB results in ~1 billion rows with many repetitive values. Partitioning in parquet is attractive too, but partitioning by either patient or gene results in too many partitions and inflates the files with schema overhead.
Either object storage or relational / non-relational database storage is feasible.
The data will be written once, and not updated. Priority is read-speed, maintenance effort & cost, in that order.
Deployment will be within AWS, reads mostly coming from kubernetes deployed microservices written in python or java.
The precise float values are not important, i.e., open to rounding off to 4 sig figs if it helps compress the data.
What are some considerations when persisting this type of data?

SOLR numeric range query versus multiple OR

Suppose there are several docs having one of the fields clientID, values from ranging 1 to 100.
Query 1:
FQ: **clientID:1 OR clientID:2 OR clientID:3 or clientID:5 or clientID:7 or client ID:8**
Query 2:
FQ: **clientID:[1 TO 3] or clientID:5 or clientID:[7 TO 8]**
Question:
Will there be a big performance difference between these two queries? If yes, how?
Doesn't SOLR do the preprocessing of translating such range values if given in multiple ORs?
There might be - depending on cached entries, etc. The second query will be two range queries and a regular query combined into three boolean clauses, while the first one will be six different boolean clauses.
Speed probably won't differ too much for your example, but as the number of clauses grow, the latter will keep the number of sets to be intersected lower than the first one. To get exact data - try it out - your core will be different from other people's cores.
And no, Solr won't preprocess anything. That's handed over to Lucene to do as it pleases, but a range query can be resolved in a different way than a exact field query. There can be entries between the terms given in your pure boolean query, so you can't translate it into a range query and expect the same result, and you can't do it the other way around either - since the field may not be integer (and even integer types differ in how they're being indexed).
The important part is usually that the fq will be cached separately, so it's usually more important to keep it re-usable across queries.
If you use the default numeric types, Solr index more than one precision for each number, (look for trieIntField and IntPointField in Solr field types
so, when when you index a 15, it index it as 15 and as 10, and when you index a 9 it index it as a 9 and as 0. When you search for a 8 - 21 range, it converts the search to a number[8] or number[9] or number[10] or number[20] or number[21]
(with binary ranges instead of decimal, but I hope you get the idea). So I suggest you use the range queries and let Solr manage the optimizations.
PointField types are the replacement for TrieFields, functionally are similar but use another data structures to store the information. So if you have a legacy index you can use the triefields, but if you are making new ones the PointFields are recommended.

ArangoDB - Graph based recommender system

I am using ArangoDB and I am trying to build a graph-based recommender system with it.
The data model just contains users, items and ratings (edges).
Therefore want to calculate the affinity of a user to a movie with the katz measure.
Eventually I want to do this:
Get all (or a certain number of) paths between a user and a item
For all of these paths do the following:
Multiply each edge's rating with a damping factor (e.g. 0.7)
Sum up all calculated values within a path
Calculate the average of all calculated path values
The result is some kind of affinity between a user and an item, weighted with the intermediary ratings and damped by a defined factor.
I was trying to realize something like that in AQL but it was either wrong or much too slow. How could a algorithm like this look in AQL?
From a performance point of view there might be better choices for graph based recommender systems. If someone has a suggestion (e.g. Item Rank or other algorithms), it would also be nice to get some ideas here.
I love this topic but sometimes I get to my borders.
In the following, #start and #end are parameters representing the two endpoints; for simplicity, I've assumed that:
the maximum admissible path length is 10000
"rates" is the name of the "edges" collection
"rating" is the name of the property giving a weight to an edge
the "damping" factor is as per the requirements
FOR v,e,p IN 0..10000 OUTBOUND #start rates
OPTIONS {uniqueVertices: "path"}
FILTER v._id==#end
LET r = AVERAGE(p.edges[*].rating) * 0.7
COLLECT AGGREGATE avg = AVERAGE(r)
RETURN avg

Motivation for k-medoids

Why would one use kmedoids algoirthm rather then kmeans? Is it only the fact that
the number of metrics that can be used in kmeans is very limited or is there something more?
Is there an example of data, for which it makes much more sense to choose the best representatives
of cluster from the data rather then from R^n?
The problem with k-means is that it is not interpretable. By interpretability i mean the model should also be able to output the reason that why it has resulted a certain output.
lets take an example.
Suppose there is food review dataset which has two posibility that there is a +ve review or a -ve review so we can say we will have k= 2 where k is the number of clusters. Now if you go with k-means where in the algorithm the third step is updation step where you update your k-centroids based on the mean distance of the points that lie in a particular cluster. The example that we have chosen is text problem, so you would also apply some kind of text-featured vector schemes like BagOfWords(BOW), word2vec. now for every review you would get the corresponding vector. Now the generated centroid c_i that you will get after running the k-means would be the mean of the vectors present in that cluster. Now with that centroid you cannot interpret much or rather i should say nothing.
But for same problem you apply k-medoids wherein you choose your k-centroids/medoids from your dataset itself. lets say you choose x_5 point from your dataset as first medoid. From this your interpretability will increase beacuse now you have the review itself which is termed as medoid/centroid. So in k-medoids you choose the centroids from your dataset itself.
This is the foremost motivation of introducing k-mediods
Coming to the metrics part you can apply all the metrics that you apply for k-means
Hope this helps.
Why would we use k-medoids instead of k-means in case of (squared) Euclidean distance?
1. Technical justification
In case of relatively small data sets (as k-medoids complexity is greater) - to obtain a clustering more robust to noise and outliers.
Example 2D data showing that:
The graph on the left shows clusters obtained with K-medoids (sklearn_extra.cluster.KMedoids method in Python with default options) and the one on the right with K-means for K=2. Blue crosses are cluster centers.
The Python code used to generate green points:
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
rng = np.random.default_rng(seed=32)
a = rng.random((6,2))*2.35 - 3*np.ones((6,2))
b = rng.random((50,2))*0.25 - 2*np.ones((50,2))
c = rng.random((100,2))*0.5 - 1.5*np.ones((100,2))
d = rng.random((7,2))*0.55
points = np.concatenate((a, b, c, d))
plt.plot(points[:,0],points[:,1],"g.", markersize=8, alpha=0.3) # green points
2. Business case justification
Here are some example business cases showing why we would prefer k-medoids. They mostly come down to the interpretability of the results and the fact that in k-medoids the resulting cluster centers are members of the original dataset.
2.1 We have a recommender engine based only on user-item preference data and want to recommend to the user those items (e.g. movies) that other similar people enjoyed. So we assign the user to his/her closest cluster and recommend top movies that the cluster representant (actual person) watched. If the cluster representant wasn't an actual person we wouldn't possess the history of actually watched movies to recommend. Each time we'd have to search additionally e.g. for the closest person from the cluster. Example data: classic MovieLens 1M Dataset
2.2 We have a database of patients and want to pick a small representative group of size K to test a new drug with them. After clustering the patients with K-medoids, cluster representants are invited to the drug trial.
Difference between is that in k-means centroids(cluster centrum) are calculated as average of vectors containing in the cluster, and in k-medoids the medoid (cluster centrum) is record from dataset closest to centroid, so if you need to represent cluster centrum by record of your data you use k-medoids, otherwise i should use k-means (but concept of these algorithms are same)
The K-Means algorithm uses a Distance Function such as Euclidean Distance or Manhattan Distance, which are computed over vector-based instances. The K-Medoid algorithm instead uses a more general (and less constrained) distance function: aka pair-wise distance function.
This distinction works well in contexts like Complex Data Types or relational rows, where the instances have a high number of dimensions.
High dimensionality problem
In standard clustering libraries and the k-means algorithms, the distance computation phase can spend a lot of time scanning the entire vector of attributes that belongs to an instance; for instance, in the context of documents clustering, using the standard TF-IDF representation. During the computation of the cosine similarity, the distance function scans all the possible words that appear in the whole collection of documents. Which in many cases can be composed by millions of entries. This is why, in this domain, some authors [1] suggests to restrict the words considered to a subset of N most frequent word of that language.
Using K-Kedoids there is no need to represent and store the documents as vectors of word frequencies.
As an alternative representation for the documents is possible to use the set of words appearing at least twice in the document; and as a distance measure, there can be used Jaccard Distance.
In this case, vector representation is long as the number of words in your dictionary.
Heterogeneousity and Complex Data Types.
There are many domains where is considerably better to abstract the implementation of an instance:
Graph's nodes clustering;
Car driving behaviour, represented as GPS routes;
Complex data type allows the design of ad-hoc distance measures which can fit better with the proper data domain.
[1] Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan, and Hinrich Schütze. 2008. Introduction to Information Retrieval. Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, USA.
Source: https://github.com/eracle/Gap

Efficient comparison of 1 million vectors containing (float, integer) tuples

I am working in a chemistry/biology project. We are building a web-application for fast matching of the user's experimental data with predicted data in a reference database. The reference database will contain up to a million entries. The data for one entry is a list (vector) of tuples containing a float value between 0.0 and 20.0 and an integer value between 1 and 18. For instance (7.2394 , 2) , (7.4011, 1) , (9.9367, 3) , ... etc.
The user will enter a similar list of tuples and the web-app must then return the - let's say - top 50 best matching database entries.
One thing is crucial: the search algorithm must allow for discrepancies between the query data and the reference data because both can contain small errors in the float values (NOT in the integer values). (The query data can contain errors because it is derived from a real-life experiment and the reference data because it is the result of a prediction.)
Edit - Moved text to answer -
How can we get an efficient ranking of 1 query on 1 million records?
You should add a physicist to the project :-) This is a very common problem to compare functions e.g. look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autocorrelation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_function
In the first link you can read: "The SEQUEST algorithm for analyzing mass spectra makes use of autocorrelation in conjunction with cross-correlation to score the similarity of an observed spectrum to an idealized spectrum representing a peptide."
An efficient linear scan of 1 million records of that type should take a fraction of a second on a modern machine; a compiled loop should be able to do it at about memory bandwidth, which would transfer that in a two or three milliseconds.
But, if you really need to optimise this, you could construct a hash table of the integer values, which would divide the job by the number of integer bins. And, if the data is stored sorted by the floats, that improves the locality of matching by those; you know you can stop once you're out of tolerance. Storing the offsets of each of a number of bins would give you a position to start.
I guess I don't see the need for a fancy algorithm yet... describe the problem a bit more, perhaps (you can assume a fairly high level of chemistry and physics knowledge if you like; I'm a physicist by training)?
Ok, given the extra info, I still see no need for anything better than a direct linear search, if there's only 1 million reference vectors and the algorithm is that simple. I just tried it, and even a pure Python implementation of linear scan took only around three seconds. It took several times longer to make up some random data to test with. This does somewhat depend on the rather lunatic level of optimisation in Python's sorting library, but that's the advantage of high level languages.
from cmath import *
import random
r = [(random.uniform(0,20), random.randint(1,18)) for i in range(1000000)]
# this is a decorate-sort-undecorate pattern
# look for matches to (7,9)
# obviously, you can use whatever distance expression you want
zz=[(abs((7-x)+(9-y)),x,y) for x,y in r]
zz.sort()
# return the 50 best matches
[(x,y) for a,x,y in zz[:50]]
Can't you sort the tuples and perform binary search on the sorted array ?
I assume your database is done once for all, and the positions of the entries is not important. You can sort this array so that the tuples are in a given order. When a tuple is entered by the user, you just look in the middle of the sorted array. If the query value is larger of the center value, you repeat the work on the upper half, otherwise on the lower one.
Worst case is log(n)
If you can "map" your reference data to x-y coordinates on a plane there is a nifty technique which allows you to select all points under a given distance/tolerance (using Hilbert curves).
Here is a detailed example.
One approach we are trying ourselves which allows for the discrepancies between query and reference is by binning the float values. We are testing and want to offer the user the choice of different bin sizes. Bin sizes will be 0.1 , 0.2 , 0.3 or 0.4. So binning leaves us with between 50 and 200 bins, each with a corresponding integer value between 0 and 18, where 0 means there was no value within that bin. The reference data can be pre-binned and stored in the database. We can then take the binned query data and compare it with the reference data. One approach could be for all bins, subtract the query integer value from the reference integer value. By summing up all differences we get the similarity score, with the the most similar reference entries resulting in the lowest scores.
Another (simpler) search option we want to offer is where the user only enters the float values. The integer values in both query as reference list can then be set to 1. We then use Hamming distance to compute the difference between the query and the reference binned values. I have previously asked about an efficient algorithm for that search.
This binning is only one way of achieving our goal. I am open to other suggestions. Perhaps we can use Principal Component Analysis (PCA), as described here

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