Scalable clustering of categorical data and applications
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Clustering is widely used to explore and understand large collections of data. In this thesis, we introduce LIMBO, a scalable hierarchical categorical clustering algorithm based on the Information Bottleneck (IB) framework for quantifying the relevant information preserved when clustering. As a hierarchical algorithm, LIMBO can produce clusterings of different sizes in a single execution. We also define a distance measure for categorical tuples and values of a specific attribute. Within this framework, we define a heuristic for discovering candidate values for the number of meaningful clusters. Next, we consider the problem of database design, which has been characterized as a process of arriving at a design that minimizes redundancy. Redundancy is measured with respect to a prescribed model for the data (a set of constraints). We consider the problem of doing database redesign when the prescribed model is unknown or incomplete. Specifically, we consider the problem of finding structural clues in a data instance, which may contain errors, missing values, and duplicate records. We propose a set of tools based on LIMBO for finding structural summaries that are useful in characterizing the information content of the data. We study the use of these summaries in ranking functional dependencies based on their data redundancy. We also consider a different application of LIMBO, that of clustering software artifacts. The majority of previous algorithms for this problem utilize structural information in order to decompose large software systems. Other approaches using non-structural information, such as file names or ownership information, have also demonstrated merit. We present an approach that combines structural and non-structural information in an integrated fashion. We apply LIMBO to two large software systems, and the results indicate that this approach produces valid and useful clusterings. Finally, we present a set of weighting schemes that specify objective assignments of importance to the values of a data set. We use well established weighting schemes from information retrieval, web search and data clustering to assess the importance of whole attributes and individual values.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it