Tabular data within enterprises or open data repositories provide a huge opportunity for feature augmentation. Using these data sources to augment training data often boosts model performance, which is crucial in data-centric AutoML systems. Recent works on automatic feature augmentation have limited capabilities in utilizing useful features that cannot be joined with the base table without connecting through intermediate tables. We present Featpilot, a novel framework that explores and integrates high-quality features in tabular data for ML models. Featpilot evaluates a candidate feature from two aspects: (1) the efficacy of a join path connecting the feature to the base table and (2) the intrinsic value of a feature towards an ML task. Featpilot efficiently identifies high-quality features and their optimized join paths to augment the base table. Our experimental results show that Featpilot achieves up to a 10.27% improvement in ML model performance compared to state-of-the-art solutions across six public datasets.

We propose OmniMatch , a novel joinability discovery technique, specifically tailored for the needs of data products : cohesive curated collections of tabular datasets. OmniMatch combines multiple column-pair similarity measures leveraging self-supervised Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). OmniMatch 's GNN captures column relatedness by leveraging graph neighborhood information, significantly improving the recall of joinability discovery tasks. At the same time, OmniMatch increases its precision by augmenting its training data with negative column join examples through an automated negative example generation process. Compared to the state-of-the-art, OmniMatch exhibits up to 14% higher effectiveness in F1 score and AUC without relying on individual, user-provided thresholds for each similarity metric.

How can we effectively generate missing data transformations among tables in a data repository? Multiple versions of the same tables are generated from the iterative process when data scientists and machine learning engineers fine-tune their ML pipelines, making incremental improvements. This process often involves data transformation and augmentation that produces an augmented table based on its base version and related tables. However, data transformations are often not well-documented or completely missing, resulting in poor traceability, reproducibility and explainability of ML pipelines. In this paper, we propose DATALoRE, a framework that explains data changes between an initial dataset and its augmented version to improves traceability. Given a base table, DATALoRE first discovers its potentially related tables from the data repository using a variety of data discovery techniques. DATALoRE then effectively leverages a large language model (LLM) to generate a variety of data transformations that lead to the augmented table. DATALoRE validates these transformations and selects the minimum number of related tables to ensure traceability and reproducibility of the ML pipelines. A preliminary experiment shows that DATALoRE is able to effectively recovery data transformations on two benchmark datasets.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have accomplished great success in learning complex systems of relations arising in broad problem settings ranging from e-commerce, social networks to data management. Training GNNs over large-scale graphs poses challenges for constrained compute resources due to the heavy data dependencies between the nodes. Moreover, modern relational data is constantly evolving, which creates an additional layer of learning challenges with respect to the model scalability and expressivity. This paper introduces a simple and efficient learning algorithm for large discrete-time dynamic graphs (DTDGs) – a widely adopted data model for many applications. We particularly tackle two critical challenges: (1) how the model can be efficiently trained on large-scale DTDGs to exploit hardware accelerators with small memory footprint, and (2) how the model can effectively capture the changing dynamics of the graphs. To the best of our knowledge, existing GNNs fail to address both challenges in their models. Hence, we propose a scalable evolving inception GNN, called SEIGN. Specifically, SEIGN features two connected evolving components that adapt the graph model to the arriving snapshot and capture the changing dynamics of the node embeddings, respectively. To scale up the model training, SEIGN introduces a parameter-free message passing step for DTDGs to substantially remove the data dependencies in training. Furthermore, it significantly reduces the training memory footprint and allows us to construct a succinct graph mini-batch without performing neighborhood sampling. We further optimize the proposed evolving strategies by extracting features from neighbors at varying scales to increase the expressive power of the node representations. Our experimental evaluation, on both public benchmark and real industrial datasets, demonstrates that SEIGN achieves 2%–20% improvement in Area Under Curve (AUC) and Average Precision (AP) on the prediction task over the state-of-the-art baselines. SEIGN also supports efficient graph mini-batch training and gains 2–16 times speedup in epoch computation time over the entire DTDGs.

Large workloads of event trend aggregation queries are widely deployed to derive high-level insights about current event trends in near real time. To speed-up the execution, we identify and leverage sharing opportunities from complex patterns with flat Kleene operators or even nested Kleene expressions. We propose Gloria, a graph-based sharing optimizer for event trend aggregation. First, we map the sharing optimization problem to a graph path search problem in the Gloria graph with execution costs encoded as weights. Second, we shrink the search space by applying cost-driven pruning principles that guarantee optimality of the reduced Gloria graph in most cases. Lastly, we propose a path search algorithm that identifies the sharing plan with minimum execution costs. Our experimental study on three real-world data sets demonstrates that our Gloria optimizer effectively reduces the search space, leading to 5-fold speed-up in optimization time. The optimized plan consistently reduces the query latency by 68%-93% compared to the plan generated by state-of-the-art approaches.

Enterprises are creating domain-specific knowledge graphs by curating and integrating their business data from multiple sources. Ontologies provide a semantic abstraction for such knowledge graphs to describe their data in terms of the entities involved and their relationships. There has been a lot of effort to build systems that enable efficient querying over knowledge graphs, represented as property graphs. However the problem of schema optimization in the property graph setting has been largely ignored. In this work, we show that graph schema design has significant impact on query performance, and propose two algorithms to generate an optimized property graph schema from the domain ontology. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to present an ontology-driven approach for property graph schema optimization. The rich semantic relationships in an ontology contain a variety of opportunities to reduce edge traversals and consequently improve the graph query performance. Our experimental study with two real-world knowledge graphs shows that our algorithms produce high-quality schemas, achieving up to 2 orders of magnitude speed-up compared to alternative schema designs.

Medical ontologies are widely used to describe and organize medical terminologies and to support many critical applications on healthcare databases. These ontologies are often manually curated (e.g., UMLS, SNOMED CT, and MeSH) by medical experts. Medical databases, on the other hand, are often created by database administrators, using different terminology and structures. The discrepancies between medical ontologies and databases compromise interoperability between them. Data to ontology matching is the process of finding semantic correspondences between tables in databases to standard ontologies. Existing solutions such as ontology matching have mostly focused on engineering features from terminological, structural, and semantic model information extracted from the ontologies. However, this is often labor intensive and the accuracy varies greatly across different ontologies. Worse yet, the ontology capturing a medical database is often not given in practice. In this paper, we propose MEDTO, a novel end-to-end framework that consists of three innovative techniques: (1) a lightweight yet effective method that bootstrap a semantically rich ontology from a given medical database, (2) a hyperbolic graph convolution layer that encodes hierarchical concepts in the hyperbolic space, and (3) a heterogeneous graph layer that encodes both local and global context information of a concept. Experiments on two real-world medical datasets matching against SNOMED CT show significant improvements compared to the state-of-the-art methods. MEDTO also consistently achieves competitive results on a benchmark from the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative.

Complex event processing (CEP) systems continuously evaluate large workloads of pattern queries under tight time constraints. Event trend aggregation queries with Kleene patterns are commonly used to retrieve summarized insights about the recent trends in event streams. State-of-art methods are limited either due to repetitive computations or unnecessary trend construction. Existing shared approaches are guided by statically selected and hence rigid sharing plans that are often sub-optimal under stream fluctuations. In this work, we propose a novel framework Hamlet that is the first to overcome these limitations. Hamlet introduces two key innovations. First, Hamlet adaptively decides at run time whether to share or not to share computations depending on the current stream properties to harvest the maximum sharing benefit. Second, Hamlet is equipped with a highly efficient shared trend aggregation strategy that avoids trend construction. Our experimental study on both real and synthetic data sets demonstrates that Hamlet consistently reduces query latency by up to five orders of magnitude compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

Medical knowledge bases (KBs), distilled from biomedical literature and regulatory actions, are expected to provide high-quality information to facilitate clinical decision making. Entity disambiguation (also referred to as entity linking) is considered as an essential task in unlocking the wealth of such medical KBs. However, existing medical entity disambiguation methods are not adequate due to word discrepancies between the entities in the KB and the text snippets in the source documents. Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have proven to be very effective and provide state-of-the-art results for many real-world applications with graph-structured data. In this paper, we introduce ED-GNN based on three representative GNNs (GraphSAGE, R-GCN, and MAGNN) for medical entity disambiguation. We develop two optimization techniques to fine-tune and improve ED-GNN. First, we introduce a novel strategy to represent entities that are mentioned in text snippets as a query graph. Second, we design an effective negative sampling strategy that identifies hard negative samples to improve the model's disambiguation capability. Compared to the best performing state-of-the-art solutions, our ED-GNN offers an average improvement of 7.3% in terms of F1 score on five real-world datasets.

Streaming analytics deploy Kleene pattern queries to detect and aggregate event trends on high-rate data streams. Despite increasing workloads, most state-of-the-art systems process each query independently, thus missing cost-saving sharing opportunities. Sharing event trend aggregation poses several technical challenges. First, Kleene patterns are in general difficult to share due to complex nesting and arbitrarily long matches. Second, not all sharing opportunities are beneficial because sharing Kleene patterns incurs non-trivial overhead to ensure the correctness of final aggregation results. We propose MUSE (Multi-query Shared Event trend aggregation), the first framework that shares aggregation queries with Kleene patterns while avoiding expensive trend construction. To find the beneficial sharing plan, the MUSE optimizer effectively selects robust sharing candidates from the exponentially large search space. Our experiments demonstrate that MUSE increases throughput by 4 orders of magnitude compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

Recent advances in natural language understanding and processing resulted in renewed interest in natural language based interfaces to data, which provide an easy mechanism for non-technical users to access and query the data. While early systems only allowed simple selection queries over a single table, some recent work supports complex BI queries, with many joins and aggregation, and even nested queries. There are various approaches in the literature for interpreting user's natural language query. Rule-based systems try to identify the entities in the query, and understand the intended relationships between those entities. Recent years have seen the emergence and popularity of neural network based approaches which try to interpret the query holistically, by learning the patterns. In this tutorial, we will review these natural language interface solutions in terms of their interpretation approach, as well as the complexity of the queries they can generate. We will also discuss open research challenges.

Domain-specific knowledge bases (KB), carefully curated from various data sources, provide an invaluable reference for professionals. Conversation systems make these KBs easily accessible to professionals and are gaining popularity due to recent advances in natural language understanding and AI. Despite the increasing use of various conversation systems in open-domain applications, the requirements of a domain-specific conversation system are quite different and challenging. In this paper, we propose an ontology-based conversation system for domain-specific KBs. In particular, we exploit the domain knowledge inherent in the domain ontology to identify user intents, and the corresponding entities to bootstrap the conversation space. We incorporate the feedback from domain experts to further refine these patterns, and use them to generate training samples for the conversation model, lifting the heavy burden from the conversation designers. We have incorporated our innovations into a conversation agent focused on healthcare as a feature of the IBM Micromedex product.

Streaming applications from cluster monitoring to algorithmic trading deploy Kleene queries to detect and aggregate event trends. Rich event matching semantics determine how to compose events into trends. The expressive power of state-of-the-art streaming systems remains limited since they do not support many of these semantics. Worse yet, they suffer from long delays and high memory costs because they maintain aggregates at a fine granularity. To overcome these limitations, our Coarse-Grained Event Trend Aggregation (Cogra) approach supports a rich variety of event matching semantics within one system. Better yet, Cogra incrementally maintains aggregates at the coarsest granularity possible for each of these semantics. In this way, Cogra minimizes the number of aggregates -- reducing both time and space complexity. Our experiments demonstrate that Cogra achieves up to six orders of magnitude speed-up and up to seven orders of magnitude memory reduction compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

Natural Language Interface to Database (NLIDB) eliminates the need for an end user to use complex query languages like SQL by translating the input natural language statements to SQL automatically. Although NLIDB systems have seen rapid growth of interest recently, the current state-of-the-art systems can at best handle point queries to retrieve certain column values satisfying some filters, or aggregation queries involving basic SQL aggregation functions. In this demo, we showcase our NLIDB system with extended capabilities for business applications that require complex nested SQL queries without prior training or feedback from human in-the-loop. In particular, our system uses novel algorithms that combine linguistic analysis with deep domain reasoning for solving core challenges in handling nested queries. To demonstrate the capabilities, we propose a new benchmark dataset containing realistic business intelligence queries, conforming to an ontology derived from FIBO and FRO financial ontologies. In this demo, we will showcase a wide range of complex business intelligence queries against our benchmark dataset, with increasing level of complexity. The users will be able to examine the SQL queries generated, and also will be provided with an English description of the interpretation.

Streaming systems evaluate massive workloads of event sequence aggregation queries. State-of-the-art approaches suffer from long delays caused by not sharing intermediate results of similar queries and by constructing event sequences prior to their aggregation. To overcome these limitations, our Shared Online Event Sequence Aggregation (Sharon) approach shares intermediate aggregates among multiple queries while avoiding the expensive construction of event sequences. Our Sharon optimizer faces two challenges. One, a sharing decision is not always beneficial. Two, a sharing decision may exclude other sharing opportunities. To guide our Sharon optimizer, we compactly encode sharing candidates, their benefits, and conflicts among candidates into the Sharon graph. Based on the graph, we map our problem of finding an optimal sharing plan to the Maximum Weight Independent Set (MWIS) problem. We then use the guaranteed weight of a greedy algorithm for the MWIS problem to prune the search of our sharing plan finder without sacrificing its optimality. The Sharon optimizer is shown to produce sharing plans that achieve up to an 18-fold speed-up compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

Event processing applications from financial fraud detection to health care analytics continuously execute event queries with Kleene closure to extract event sequences of arbitrary, statically unknown length, called Complete Event Trends (CETs). Due to common event sub-sequences in CETs, either the responsiveness is delayed by repeated computations or an exorbitant amount of memory is required to store partial results. To overcome these limitations, we define the CET graph to compactly encode all CETs matched by a query. Based on the graph, we define the spectrum of CET detection algorithms from CPU-optimal to memory-optimal. We find the middle ground between these two extremes by partitioning the graph into time-centric graphlets and caching partial CETs per graphlet to enable effective reuse of these intermediate results. We reveal cost monotonicity properties of the search space of graph partitioning plans. Our CET optimizer leverages these properties to prune significant portions of the search to produce a partitioning plan with minimal CPU costs yet within the given memory limit. Our experimental study demonstrates that our CET detection solution achieves up to 42--fold speed-up even under rigid memory constraints compared to the state-of-the-art techniques in diverse scenarios.

Streaming applications from algorithmic trading to traffic management deploy Kleene patterns to detect and aggregate arbitrarily-long event sequences, called event trends. State-of-the-art systems process such queries in two steps. Namely, they first construct all trends and then aggregate them. Due to the exponential costs of trend construction, this two-step approach suffers from both a long delays and high memory costs. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Graph-based Real-time Event Trend Aggregation (GRETA) approach that dynamically computes event trend aggregation without first constructing these trends. We define the GRETA graph to compactly encode all trends. Our GRETA runtime incrementally maintains the graph, while dynamically propagating aggregates along its edges. Based on the graph, the final aggregate is incrementally updated and instantaneously returned at the end of each query window. Our GRETA runtime represents a win-win solution, reducing both the time complexity from exponential to quadratic and the space complexity from exponential to linear in the number of events. Our experiments demonstrate that GRETA achieves up to four orders of magnitude speed-up and up to 50--fold memory reduction compared to the state-of-the-art two-step approaches.

While recurring queries over evolving data are the bedrock of the analytical applications, resources demanded to process a large amount of data for each recurring execution can be a fatal bottleneck in cost-sensitive cloud computing environments. It is thus imperative to design a system responsive to users' preferences regarding how resources should be utilized. In this work, we propose PRO, a preference-aware recurring query processing system that optimizes recurring query executions complying with user preferences. First, we show that finding an optimal is an NP-complete problem due to the cost interdependencies between consecutive executions. We propose an execution relation graph (ERG) model that effectively incorporates these dependencies between executions. This model enables us to transform our problem into a well-known graph problem. We then design a graph-based approach (called PRO-OPT) leveraging dynamic programming and pruning techniques with pseudo-polynomial complexity. Our experiments confirm that PRO consistently outperforms state-of-the-art solutions by 9 fold in processing time under a rich variety of circumstances on the Wikipedia datasets.

Complex Event Processing (CEP) has emerged as a technology of choice for high performance event analytics in time-critical decision-making applications. Yet it is becoming increasingly difficult to support high-performance event processing due to the rising number and complexity of event pattern queries and the increasingly high velocity of event streams. In this work we design the SPASS framework that successfully tackles these demanding CEP workloads. Our SPASS optimizer identifies opportunities for effective shared processing among CEP queries by leveraging time-based event correlations among queries. The problem of pattern sharing is shown to be NP-hard by reducing the Minimum Substring Cover problem to our CEP pattern sharing problem. The SPASS optimizer is designed that finds a shared pattern plan in polynomial-time covering all sequence patterns while still guaranteeing an optimality bound. To execute this shared pattern plan, the SPASS runtime employs stream transactions that assure concurrent shared maintenance and re-use of sub-patterns across queries. Our experimental study confirms that the SPASS framework achieves over 16 fold performance improvement for a wide range of experiments compared to the state-of-the-art solution.

With the increasing complexity of data-intensive MapReduce workloads, Hadoop must often accommodate hundreds or even thousands of recurring analytics queries that periodically execute over frequently updated datasets, e.g., latest stock transactions, new log files, or recent news feeds. For many applications, such recurring queries come with user-specified service-level agreements (SLAs), commonly expressed as the maximum allowed latency for producing results before their merits decay. The recurring nature of these emerging workloads combined with their SLA constraints make it challenging to share and optimize their execution. While some recent efforts on multi-job optimization in MapReduce have emerged, they focus on only sharing work among ad-hoc jobs on static datasets. Unfortunately, these sharing techniques neither take the recurring nature of the queries into account nor guarantee the satisfaction of the SLA requirements. In this work, we propose the first scalable multi-query sharing engine tailored for recurring workloads in the MapReduce infrastructure, called "Helix" . Helix deploys new sliced window-alignment techniques to create sharing opportunities among recurring queries without introducing additional I/O overheads or unnecessary data scans. And then, Helix introduces a cost/benefit model for creating a sharing plan among the recurring queries, and a scheduling strategy for executing them to maximize the SLA satisfaction. Our experimental results over real-world datasets confirm that Helix significantly outperforms the state-of-art techniques by an order of magnitude.

The growing demand for large-scale data analytics ranging from online advertisement placement, log processing, to fraud detection, has led to the design of highly scalable data-intensive computing infrastructures such as the Hadoop platform. Recurring queries, re-peatedly being executed for long periods of time on rapidly evolv-ing high-volume data, have become a bedrock component in most of these analytic applications. Despite their importance, the plain Hadoop along with its state-of-art extensions lack built-in support for recurring queries. In particular, they lack efficient and scal-able analytics over evolving datasets. In this work, we present the Redoop system, an extension of the Hadoop framework, designed to fill in this void. Redoop supports recurring queries as first-class citizen in Hadoop without sacrificing any of its core features. More importantly, Redoop deploys innovative window-aware opti-mization techniques for recurring query execution including adap-tive window-aware data partitioning, window-aware task schedul-ing, and inter-window caching mechanisms. Redoop retains the fault-tolerance of MapReduce via automatic cache recovery and task re-execution support. Our extensive experimental study with real datasets demonstrates that Redoop achieves significant run-time performance gains of up to 9x speedup compared to the plain Hadoop. 1.

This demonstration presents the Redoop infrastructure, the first full-fledged MapReduce framework with native support for recurring big data queries. Recurring queries, repeatedly being executed for long periods of time over evolving high-volume data, have become a bedrock component in most large-scale data analytic applications. Redoop is a comprehensive extension to Hadoop that pushes the support and optimization of recurring queries into Hadoop's core functionality. While backward compatible with regular MapReduce jobs, Redoop achieves an order of magnitude better performance than Hadoop for recurring workloads. Redoop employs innovative window-aware optimization techniques for such recurring workloads including adaptive window-aware data partitioning, cache-aware task scheduling, and inter-window caching mechanisms. We will demonstrate Redoop's capabilities on a compute cluster against real life workloads including click-stream and sensor data analysis.

Distributed stream processing systems must function efficiently for data streams that fluctuate in their arrival rates and data distributions. Yet repeated and prohibitively expensive load reallocation across machines may make these systems ineffective, potentially resulting in data loss or even system failure. To overcome this problem, we propose a comprehensive solution, called the Robust Load Distribution (RLD) strategy, that is resilient under data fluctuations. RLD provides ϵ-optimal query performance under an expected range of load fluctuations without suffering from the performance penalty caused by load migration. RLD is based on three key strategies. First, we model robust distributed stream processing as a parametric query optimization problem in a parameter space that captures the stream fluctuations. The notions of both robust logical and robust physical plans that work together to proactively handle all ranges of expected fluctuations in parameters are abstracted as overlays of this parameter space. Second, our Early-terminated Robust Partitioning ( ERP ) finds a combination of robust logical plans that together cover the parameter space, while minimizing the number of prohibitively expensive optimizer calls with a probabilistic bound on the space coverage. Third, we design a family of algorithms for physical plan generation. Our GreedyPhy exploits a probabilistic model to efficiently find a robust physical plan that sustains most frequently used robust logical plans at runtime. Our CorPhy algorithm exploits operator correlations for the robust physical plan optimization. The resulting physical plan smooths the workload on each node under all expected fluctuations. Our OptPrune algorithm, using CorPhy as baseline, is guaranteed to find the optimal physical plan that maximizes the parameter space coverage with a practical increase in optimization time. Lastly, we further expand the capabilities of our proposed RLD framework to also appropriately react under so-called “space drifts”, that is, a space drift is a change of the parameter space where the observed runtime statistics deviate from the expected optimization-time statistics. Our RLD solution is capable of adjusting itself to the unexpected yet significant data fluctuations beyond those planned for via covering the parameter space. Our experimental study using stock market and sensor network streams demonstrates that our RLD methodology consistently outperforms state-of-the-art solutions in terms of efficiency and effectiveness in highly fluctuating data stream environments.

Distributed stream processing systems must function efficiently for data streams that fluctuate in their arrival rates and data distributions. Yet repeated and prohibitively expensive load re-allocation across machines may make these systems ineffective, potentially resulting in data loss or even system failure. To overcome this problem, we instead propose a load distribution (RLD) strategy that is robust to data fluctuations. RLD provides ϵ-optimal query performance under load fluctuations without suffering from the performance penalty caused by load migration. RLD is based on three key strategies. First, we model robust distributed stream processing as a parametric query optimization problem. The notions of robust logical and robust physical plans then are overlays of this parameter space. Second, our Early-terminated Robust Partitioning (ERP) finds a set of robust logical plans, covering the parameter space, while minimizing the number of prohibitively expensive optimizer calls with a probabilistic bound on the space coverage. Third, our OptPrune algorithm maps the space-covering logical solution to a single robust physical plan tolerant to deviations in data statistics that maximizes the parameter space coverage at runtime. Our experimental study using stock market and sensor networks streams demonstrates that our RLD methodology consistently outperforms state-of-the-art solutions in terms of efficiency and effectiveness in highly fluctuating data stream environments.