Informatica

We tested the ability of humans and machines (data mining techniques) to assign stress to Slovene words. This is a challenging comparison for machines since humans accomplish the task outstandingly even on unknown words without any context. The goal of finding good machine-made models for stress assignment was set by applying new methods and by making use of a known theory about rules for stress assignment in Slovene. The upgraded data mining methods outperformed expert-defined rules on practically all subtasks, thus showing that data mining can more than compete with humans when constructing formal knowledge about stress assignment is concerned. Unfortunately, compared to humans directly, the data mining methods still failed to achieve as good results as humans on assigning stress to unknown words.

This paper studies an adaptive clustering problem. We focus on re-clustering an object set, previously clustered, when the feature set characterizing the objects increases. We propose an adaptive clustering method based on a hierarchical agglomerative approach, Hierarchical Adaptive Clustering (HAC), that adjusts the partitioning into clusters that was established by applying the hierarchical agglomerative clustering algorithm (HACA) (Han and Kamber, 2001) before the feature set changed. We aim to reach the result more efficiently than running HACA again from scratch on the feature-extended object set. Experiments testing the method's efficiency and a practical distributed systems problem in which the HAC method can be efficiently used (the problem of adaptive horizontal fragmentation in object oriented databases) are also reported.

In this paper, the relative multidimensional scaling method is investigated. This method is designated to visualize large multidimensional data. The method encompasses application of multidimensional scaling (MDS) to the so-called basic vector set and further mapping of the remaining vectors from the analyzed data set. In the original algorithm of relative MDS, the visualization process is divided into three steps: the set of basis vectors is constructed using the k-means clustering method; this set is projected onto the plane using the MDS algorithm; the set of remaining data is visualized using the relative mapping algorithm. We propose a modification, which differs from the original algorithm in the strategy of selecting the basis vectors. The experimental investigation has shown that the modification exceeds the original algorithm in the visualization quality and computational expenses. The conditions, where the relative MDS efficiency exceeds that of standard MDS, are estimated.

The Star Plot approach to high-dimensional data visualization is applied to multi-attribute dichotomies. It is observed that the areas of the plot for the two parts of a dichotomy may be used as an aggregate measure of their relative dominance. An optimization model is developed to determine a topology (or weighted configuration of the attributes) that maximizes the resolution of this measure with respect to a given set of reference dichotomies.

We consider finite population slotted ALOHA where each of n terminals has its own transmission probability pi. Given the overall traffic load λ, the probabilities pi are determined in such a way as to maximize throughput. This is achieved by solving a constrained optimization problem. The results of Abramson (1970) are obtained as a special case. Our recent results are improved (Mathar and Žilinskas, 1993).