Say I want to build a check-in aggregator that counts visits across platforms, so that I can know for a given place how many people have checked in there on Foursquare, Gowalla, BrightKite, etc. Is there a good library or set of tools I can use out of the box to associate the venue entries in each service with a unique place identifier of my own?
I basically want a function that can map from a pair of (placename, address, lat/long) tuples to [0,1) confidence that they refer to the same real-world location.
Someone must have done this already, but my google-fu is weak.
Yes, you can submit the two addresses using geocoder.net (assuming you're a .Net developer, you didn't say). It provides a common interface for address verification and geocoding, so you can be reasonably sure that one address equals another.
If you can't get them to standardize and match, you can compare their distances and assume they are the same place if they are below a certain threshold away from each other.
I'm pessimist that there is such a tool already accessible.
A good solution to match pairs based on the entity resolution literature would be to
get the placenames, define and use a good distance function on them (eg. edit distance),
get the address, standardize (eg. with the mentioned geocoder.net tools), and also define distance between them,
get the coordinates and get a distance (this is easy: there are lots of libraries and tools for geographic distance calculations, and that seems to be a good metric),
turn the distances to probabilities ("what is the probability of such a distance, if we suppose these are the same places")(not straightforward),
and combine the probabilities (not straightforward also).
Then maybe a closure-like algorithm (close the set according to merging pairs above a given probability treshold) also can help to find all the matchings (for example when different names accumulate for a given venue).
It wouldn't be a bad tool or service however.
Related
I'm trying to figure out the best way to analyse a grasshopper/rhino floor plan. I am trying to create a room map to determine how many doors it takes to reach an exit in a residential building. The inputs are the room curves, names and doors.
I have tried to use space syntax or SYNTACTIC, but some of the components are missing. Alot of the plugins I have been looking at are good at creating floor plans but not analysing them.
Your help would be greaty appreciated :)
You could create some sort of spine that goes through the rooms that passes only through doors, and do some path finding across the topology counting how many "hops" you need to reach the exit.
So one way to get the topology is to create a data structure (a tuple, keyValuePair) that holds the curve (room) and a point (the door), now loop each room to each other and see if the point/door of each of the rooms is closer than some threshold, if it is, store the relationship as a graph (in the abstract sense you don't really need to make lines out of it, but if you plan to use other plugins for path-finding, this can be useful), then run some path-finding (Dijkstra's, A*, etc...) to find the shortest distance.
As for SYNTACTIC: If copying the GHA after unblocking from the installation path to the special components folder (or pointing the folder from _GrasshopperDeveloperSettings) doesn't work, tick the Memory load *.GHA assemblies using COFF byte arrays option of the _GrasshopperDeveloperSettings.
*Note that SYNTACTIC won't give you any automatic topology.
If you need some pseudo-code just write a comment and I'd be happy to help.
I have location data from a large number of users (hundreds of thousands). I store the current position and a few historical data points (minute data going back one hour).
How would I go about detecting crowds that gather around natural events like birthday parties etc.? Even smaller crowds (let's say starting from 5 people) should be detected.
The algorithm needs to work in almost real time (or at least once a minute) to detect crowds as they happen.
I have looked into many cluster analysis algorithms, but most of them seem like a bad choice. They either take too long (I have seen O(n^3) and O(2^n)) or need to know how many clusters there are beforehand.
Can someone help me? Thank you!
Let each user be it's own cluster. When she gets within distance R to another user form a new cluster and separate again when the person leaves. You have your event when:
Number of people is greater than N
They are in the same place for the timer greater than T
The party is not moving (might indicate a public transport)
It's not located in public service buildings (hospital, school etc.)
(good number of other conditions)
One minute is plenty of time to get it done even on hundreds of thousands of people. In naive implementation it would be O(n^2), but mind there is no point in comparing location of each individual, only those in close neighbourhood. In first approximation you can divide the "world" into sectors, which also makes it easy to make the task parallel - and in turn easily scale. More users? Just add a few more nodes and downscale.
One idea would be to think in terms of 'mass' and centre of gravity. First of all, do not mark something as event until the mass is not greater than e.g. 15 units. Sure, location is imprecise, but in case of events it should average around centre of the event. If your cluster grows in any direction without adding substantial mass, then most likely it isn't right. Look at methods like DBSCAN (density-based clustering), good inspiration can be also taken from physical systems, even Ising model (here you think in terms of temperature and "flipping" someone to join the crowd)ale at time of limited activity.
How to avoid "single-linkage problem" mentioned by author in comments? One idea would be to think in terms of 'mass' and centre of gravity. First of all, do not mark something as event until the mass is not greater than e.g. 15 units. Sure, location is imprecise, but in case of events it should average around centre of the event. If your cluster grows in any direction without adding substantial mass, then most likely it isn't right. Look at methods like DBSCAN (density-based clustering), good inspiration can be also taken from physical systems, even Ising model (here you think in terms of temperature and "flipping" someone to join the crowd). It is not a novel problem and I am sure there are papers that cover it (partially), e.g. Is There a Crowd? Experiences in Using Density-Based Clustering and Outlier Detection.
There is little use in doing a full clustering.
Just uses good database index.
Keep a database of the current positions.
Whenever you get a new coordinate, query the database with the desired radius, say 50 meters. A good index will do this in O(log n) for a small radius. If you get enough results, this may be an event, or someone joining an ongoing event.
I am trying to implement a Support Vector Machine to understand in and out of it but I am stuck on how to implement it.
Everywhere it is explained how to get a hyper-plane such that we are able to separate different classes. My question is how to get the data to Feature Space Y from Input Space I.
Like for example consider below data:
date userId pc activity
01/04/2010 07:12:31 RES0962 PC-3736 Connect
01/04/2010 07:35:40 RES0962 PC-2588 Disconnect
01/04/2010 08:02:14 ZKH0388 PC-1021 Connect
01/04/2010 08:20:17 ZKH0388 PC-3736 Disconnect
Q) Assuming we are trying to build a User behavior model. We can extract features of each user and use it to train but in terms of code how its working? I have no idea about that. If someone could explain that it would be of great help.
Mapping to feature space requires you to have a weight for each of the distinct feature that determine the classes of your input. Getting the weight is a function of clearly understood the theoretical basis of your project e.g Your financial worth is determined by Money in bank and Investment. The weight of money in bank might be 2; while for investment mightt be 5. therefore, somebody with more investment and less money will likely be with more networths.
Now, the two features money in bank and investment will now be treated as a cordinate x and y respectively as you wished for each inputed data(of course with two features). Imagine you plot the graph after knowing each data (x, y) cordinate based on your weight. Then, getting the hyperplane will be the next challenge. I hope this help. Good luck
I would like to perform a binary classification of documents (.txt, .pdf, .jpeg, .img, etc.) into two categories: printable and non-printable. Essentially our school runs a free printing service for clubs, but the reality is that many clubs abuse the free printing and end up printing their homework, papers, etc., which amounts to thousands of dollars in ink and paper. Thus we would like to take some unsupervised methods to help limit this by determining whether a document is with high probability not club related (e.g. Biophysics paper, there is no biophysics club!).
So this is a very simple binary classification problem. I am not looking for low-level implementation details or which ML algorithms I should use, but rather how I should discover the relevant features that will then be fed to the training, etc.
My first idea was to gather all the documents that students print in the library. The idea is that if you have actual club printing, you'll do it for free at the club printing center rather than pay for it at the library. That would be a massive dataset, assuming every document printed at the library is assigned the non-printable/club material category. Unfortunately, the school is very liberal and opposed to allowing this due to privacy concerns, so it is not really an option without legal risks.
A similar-minded option would be to collect documents that are tied to courses / school work, e.g. course syllabi, available course documents online (homeworks, papers, etc.) and do feature extraction / selection on these. The assumption is that students would be abusing the printing to generally print material relevant to their studies.
While for .pdf and .txt based document this approach should have reasonable performance, I am at a loss at how to classify image based documents, besides perhaps using the title of the document and other meta data. A clever violator could simply convert all their text documents to image format to circumvent this system. However that is outside the scope of this question and should be saved for a future question / research. For now the scope is just text based documents.
Note that there are previous questions on topics similar to this, but mine is very specific and I believe it may pose challenges that something like movie review classification might not have to face.
I just wanted to leave a comment but it ended way longer than what I imagined.
While this is an interesting problem I'm not sure ML will get you what you need easily.
Firstly your classification problem is of the type A vs the World and A isn't strictly defined. Unless you know exactly what kind of stuff the clubs print you can't really say that new material belong or no to that class.
This will prove particularly difficult when you will need to assemble a large enough training set to be able to cover whatever can or cannot be printed. Such task will be extremely tedious, and as you said you won't have access to what the clubs usually print out so at best you will have a large class imbalance in your training set.
As the goal is to make the system automated (I mean if there is human interaction anyway, it's faster to check what will be printed than to make a ML algorithm that will provide a score that a human will have to investigate anyway) the number of false positives and false negatives will also be problematic. There will be cases where the clubs won't be able to print things they have the right to.
As you said you could simplify greatly the problem by classifying Course Material and Not Course Material. For that I will look towards BoW because some words are more present than others in papers or course material (everything remotely technical). The number of words as well as the overall size of the file seem like sensible things to extract. The structure is often also particular : it might be a good idea to extract such things : "number of lines with less than x words", "number of lines per page", "number of pictures" (if that's something you can extract from the file), ...
For pictures the major thing to check would be if this a scan of something (often they will scan and print course related things I guess), for that the format of the image is already a good indication but I don't see other things that would be particularly "course related".
So for me, if you can't really define precisely one of your two classes don't go with classification or reduce the problem to something you can really define (course related things).
If you are able to compile a "black list" of documents students are not allowed to print, you can then implement a several layers rejection mechanism.
I would suggest these 3 levels:
compare the md5 of the file they want to print with a database of all the md5 of the black-listed documents.
if the 1) is passed, compare repeat 1) but at a page level, rather than at document level (perhaps they want to print just few pages rather than the entire document).
if 2) is passed you can compare the page they want to print with the pages of the black-listed documents document using an image similarity method, like SSIM. if you get a high score between the page they want print and one of the black-listed items do not print, and update your md5 database accordingly.
if 3) is passed: print!
A few words about SSIM: this method is quite robust to noise, so even a smart student who added some sort of niose to the image will be caught
However:
you have to find a proper way to extract a region of interest (ROI) from the page and the db of documents (if the two ROIs are in two different area of the page, SSIM will be negative)
SSIM might be slow! definitely a C implementation is needed here.
I think SSIM is not rotational invariant, hence the check will fail if they print the page upside down (unless you have a smart way to rotate the page).
I'm doing a university project, that must gather and combine data on a user provided topic. The problem I've encountered is that Google search results for many terms are polluted with low quality autogenerated pages and if I use them, I can end up with wrong facts. How is it possible to estimate the quality/trustworthiness of a page?
You may think "nah, Google engineers are working on the problem for 10 years and he's asking for a solution", but if you think about it, SE must provide up-to-date content and if it marks a good page as a bad one, users will be dissatisfied. I don't have such limitations, so if the algorithm accidentally marks as bad some good pages, that wouldn't be a problem.
Here's an example:
Say the input is buy aspirin in south la. Try to Google search it. The first 3 results are already deleted from the sites, but the fourth one is interesting: radioteleginen.ning.com/profile/BuyASAAspirin (I don't want to make an active link)
Here's the first paragraph of the text:
The bare of purchasing prescription drugs from Canada is big
in the U.S. at this moment. This is
because in the U.S. prescription drug
prices bang skyrocketed making it
arduous for those who bang limited or
concentrated incomes to buy their much
needed medications. Americans pay more
for their drugs than anyone in the
class.
The rest of the text is similar and then the list of related keywords follows. This is what I think is a low quality page. While this particular text seems to make sense (except it's horrible), the other examples I've seen (yet can't find now) are just some rubbish, whose purpose is to get some users from Google and get banned 1 day after creation.
N-gram Language Models
You could try training one n-gram language model on the autogenerated spam pages and one on a collection of other non-spam webpages.
You could then simply score new pages with both language models to see if the text looks more similar to the spam webpages or regular web content.
Better Scoring through Bayes Law
When you score a text with the spam language model, you get an estimate of the probability of finding that text on a spam web page, P(Text|Spam). The notation reads as the probability of Text given Spam (page). The score from the non-spam language model is an estimate of the probability of finding the text on a non-spam web page, P(Text|Non-Spam).
However, the term you probably really want is P(Spam|Text) or, equivalently P(Non-Spam|Text). That is, you want to know the probability that a page is Spam or Non-Spam given the text that appears on it.
To get either of these, you'll need to use Bayes Law, which states
P(B|A)P(A)
P(A|B) = ------------
P(B)
Using Bayes law, we have
P(Spam|Text)=P(Text|Spam)P(Spam)/P(Text)
and
P(Non-Spam|Text)=P(Text|Non-Spam)P(Non-Spam)/P(Text)
P(Spam) is your prior belief that a page selected at random from the web is a spam page. You can estimate this quantity by counting how many spam web pages there are in some sample, or you can even use it as a parameter that you manually tune to trade-off precision and recall. For example, giving this parameter a high value will result in fewer spam pages being mistakenly classified as non-spam, while given it a low value will result in fewer non-spam pages being accidentally classified as spam.
The term P(Text) is the overall probability of finding Text on any webpage. If we ignore that P(Text|Spam) and P(Text|Non-Spam) were determined using different models, this can be calculated as P(Text)=P(Text|Spam)P(Spam) + P(Text|Non-Spam)P(Non-Spam). This sums out the binary variable Spam/Non-Spam.
Classification Only
However, if you're not going to use the probabilities for anything else, you don't need to calculate P(Text). Rather, you can just compare the numerators P(Text|Spam)P(Spam) and P(Text|Non-Spam)P(Non-Spam). If the first one is bigger, the page is most likely a spam page, while if the second one is bigger the page is mostly likely non-spam. This works since the equations above for both P(Spam|Text) and P(Non-Spam|Text) are normalized by the same P(Text) value.
Tools
In terms of software toolkits you could use for something like this, SRILM would be a good place to start and it's free for non-commercial use. If you want to use something commercially and you don't want to pay for a license, you could use IRST LM, which is distributed under the LGPL.
Define 'quality' of a web - page? What is the metric?
If someone was looking to buy fruit, then searching for 'big sweet melons' will give many results that contain images of a 'non textile' slant.
The markup and hosting of those pages may however be sound engineering ..
But a page of a dirt farmer presenting his high quality, tasty and healthy produce might be visible only in IE4.5 since the html is 'broken' ...
For each result set per keyword query, do a separate google query to find number of sites linking to this site, if no other site links to this site, then exclude it. I think this would be a good start at least.
if you are looking for performance related metrics then Y!Slow [plugin for firefox] could be useful.
http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/
You can use a supervised learning model to do this type of classification. The general process goes as follows:
Get a sample set for training. This will need to provide examples of documents you want to cover. The more general you want to be the larger the example set you need to use. If you want to just focus on websites related to aspirin then that shrinks the necessary sample set.
Extract features from the documents. This could be the words pulled from the website.
Feed the features into a classifier such as ones provided in (MALLET or WEKA).
Evaluate the model using something like k-fold cross validation.
Use the model to rate new websites.
When you talk about not caring if you mark a good site as a bad site this is called recall. Recall measures of the ones you should get back how many you actually got back. Precision measures of the ones you marked as 'good' and 'bad' how many were correct. Since you state your goal to be more precise and recall isn't as important you can then tweak your model to have higher precision.