Developing data mining algorithms that are suitable for cloud computing platforms is currently an active area of research, as is developing cloud computing platforms appropriate for data mining. Currently, the most common benchmark for cloud computing is the Terasort (and related) benchmarks. Although the Terasort Benchmark is quite useful, it was not designed for data mining per se. In this paper, we introduce a benchmark called MalStone that is specifically designed to measure the performance of cloud computing middleware that supports the type of data intensive computing common when building data mining models. We also introduce MalGen, which is a utility for generating data on clouds that can be used with MalStone.

An important problem in data mining is detecting changes in large datasets. Although there are a variety of change detection algorithms that have been developed, in practice it can be a problem to scale these algorithms to large data sets due to the heterogeneity of the data. In this paper, we describe a case study involving payment card data in which we built and monitored a separate change detection model for each cell in a multi-dimensional data cube. We describe a system that has been in operation for the past two years that builds and monitors over 15,000 separate baseline models and the process that isused for generating and investigating alerts using these baselines.