Lamine M. Aouad

Lamine M. Aouad, Nhien-An Le-Khac, Tahar M. Kechadi

In this article, we focus on distributed Apriori-based frequent itemsets mining. We present a new distributed approach which takes into account inherent characteristics of this algorithm. We study the distribution aspect of this algorithm and give a comparison of the proposed approach with a classical Apriori-like distributed algorithm, using both analytical and experimental studies. We find that under a wide range of conditions and datasets, the performance of a distributed Apriori-like algorithm is not related to global strategies of pruning since the performance of the local Apriori generation is usually characterized by relatively high success rates of candidate sets frequency at low levels which switch to very low rates at some stage, and often drops to zero. This means that the intermediate communication steps and remote support counts computation and collection in classical distributed schemes are computationally inefficient locally, and then constrains the global performance. Our performance evaluation is done on a large cluster of workstations using the Condor system and its workflow manager DAGMan. The results show that the presented approach greatly enhances the performance and achieves good scalability compared to a typical distributed Apriori founded algorithm.

Alejandro Mosquera, Lamine Aouad, Slawomir Grzonkowski et al.

The use of short text messages in social media and instant messaging has become a popular communication channel during the last years. This rising popularity has caused an increment in messaging threats such as spam, phishing or malware as well as other threats. The processing of these short text message threats could pose additional challenges such as the presence of lexical variants, SMS-like contractions or advanced obfuscations which can degrade the performance of traditional filtering solutions. By using a real-world SMS data set from a large telecommunications operator from the US and a social media corpus, in this paper we analyze the effectiveness of machine learning filters based on linguistic and behavioral patterns in order to detect short text spam and abusive users in the network. We have also explored different ways to deal with short text message challenges such as tokenization and entity detection by using text normalization and substring clustering techniques. The obtained results show the validity of the proposed solution by enhancing baseline approaches.