Discovering Representative Skyline Points over Distributed Data

Given an integer k, a representative skyline contains the k skyline points that best describe the tradeoffs among different dimensions offered by the full skyline. Although this topic has been previously studied, the existing solution may sometimes produce k points that appear in an arbitrarily tiny cluster, and therefore, fail to be representative. Motivated by this, we propose a new definition of representative skyline that minimizes the distance between a non-representative skyline point and its nearest representative. We also study algorithms for computing distance-based representative skylines. In 2D space, there is a dynamic programming algorithm that guarantees the optimal solution. For dimensionality at least 3, we prove that the problem is NP-hard, and give a 2-approximate polynomial time algorithm. Using a multidimensional access method, our algorithm can directly report the representative skyline, without retrieving the full skyline. We show that our representative skyline not only better captures the contour of the entire skyline than the previous method, but also can be computed much faster.

In many decision-making applications, the skyline query is frequently used to find a set of dominating data points (called skyline points) in a multi-dimensional dataset. In a high-dimensional space skyline points no longer offer any interesting insights as there are too many of them. In this paper, we introduce a novel metric, called skyline frequency that compares and ranks the interestingness of data points based on how often they are returned in the skyline when different number of dimensions (i.e., subspaces) are considered. Intuitively, a point with a high skyline frequency is more interesting as it can be dominated on fewer combinations of the dimensions. Thus, the problem becomes one of finding top-k frequent skyline points. But the algorithms thus far proposed for skyline computation typically do not scale well with dimensionality. Moreover, frequent skyline computation requires that skylines be computed for each of an exponential number of subsets of the dimensions. We present efficient approximate algorithms to address these twin difficulties. Our extensive performance study shows that our approximate algorithm can run fast and compute the correct result on large data sets in high-dimensional spaces.

Skyline computation has many applications including multi-criteria decision making. In this paper, we study the problem of selecting k skyline points so that the number of points, which are dominated by at least one of these k skyline points, is maximized. We first present an efficient dynamic programming based exact algorithm in a 2d-space. Then, we show that the problem is NP-hard when the dimensionality is 3 or more and it can be approximately solved by a polynomial time algorithm with the guaranteed approximation ratio 1-1/e. To speed-up the computation, an efficient, scalable, index-based randomized algorithm is developed by applying the FM probabilistic counting technique. A comprehensive performance evaluation demonstrates that our randomized technique is very efficient, highly accurate, and scalable.

Recently, skyline queries have attracted much attention in the database research community. Space partitioning techniques, such as recursive division of the data space, have been used for skyline query processing in centralized, parallel and distributed settings. Unfortunately, such grid-based partitioning is not suitable in the case of a parallel skyline query, where allpartitions are examined at the same time, since many data partitions do not contribute to the overall skyline set, resulting in a lot of redundant processing.In this paper we propose a novel angle-based space partitioning scheme using the hyperspherical coordinates of the data points. We demonstrate both formally as well as through an exhaustive set of experiments that this new scheme is very suitable for skyline query processing in a parallel share-nothing architecture. The intuition of our partitioning technique is that the skyline points are equally spread to all partitions. We also show that partitioning the data according to the hyperspherical coordinates manages to increase the average pruning power of points within a partition. Our novel partitioning scheme alleviates most of the problems of traditional grid partitioning techniques, thus managing to reduce the response time and share the computational workload more fairly. As demonstrated by our experimental study, our technique outperforms grid partitioning in all cases, thus becoming an efficient and scalable solution for skyline query processing in parallel environments.

Skyline queries have wide-ranging applications in fields that involve multi-criteria decision making, including tourism, retail industry, and human resources. By automatically removing incompetent candidates, skyline queries allow users to focus on a subset of superior data items (i.e., the skyline), thus reducing the decision-making overhead. However, users are still required to interpret and compare these superior items manually before making a successful choice. This task is challenging because of two issues. First, people usually have fuzzy, unstable, and inconsistent preferences when presented with multiple candidates. Second, skyline queries do not reveal the reasons for the superiority of certain skyline points in a multi-dimensional space. To address these issues, we propose SkyLens, a visual analytic system aiming at revealing the superiority of skyline points from different perspectives and at different scales to aid users in their decision making. Two scenarios demonstrate the usefulness of SkyLens on two datasets with a dozen of attributes. A qualitative study is also conducted to show that users can efficiently accomplish skyline understanding and comparison tasks with SkyLens.

Skyline queries have attracted considerable attention to assist multicriteria analysis of large-scale datasets. In this paper, we focus on multidimensional subspace skyline computation that has been actively studied for two approaches. First, to narrow down a full-space skyline, users may consider multiple subspace skylines reflecting their interest. For this purpose, we tackle the concept of a skycube, which consists of all possible non-empty subspace skylines in a given full space. Second, to understand diverse semantics of subspace skylines, we address skyline groups in which a skyline point (or a set of skyline points) is annotated with decisive subspaces. Our primary contributions are to identify common building blocks of the two approaches and to develop orthogonal optimization principles that benefit both approaches. Our experimental results show the efficiency of proposed algorithms by comparing them with state-of-the-art algorithms in both synthetic and real-life datasets.

MSSQ: Manhattan Spatial Skyline Queries

Skyline computation has been widely used in many research areas such as database visualization, data mining and multi-criteria decision making. In order to process massive data, in this paper, we propose a two phase method to calculate Skyline points. In the first phase, all the supported non-dominated skyline points are calculated with Quickhull algorithm. Then in the second phase, all the unsupported non-dominated points are calculated with Block Nested Loop (BNL) algorithm. We test the algorithm on three different types of synthetic data sets and compare it with BNL algorithm and Sort Filter Skyline (SFS) algorithm. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithm performs better than BNL and SFS on most of the test datasets.

Skyline queries play an important role in applications such as multicriteria decision making and user preference systems. Recently, more attention has been paid to the problem of efficient skyline computation in the P2P systems. Due to the high distribution of the P2P networks, the skyline computation incurs too many intermediate results transferred between peers, which consumes mass of the network bandwidth. Additionally, a large number of peers are involved in the skyline computation, which introduces both heavy communication cost and computational overhead. In this paper, we propose a novel Distributed Caching Mechanism (DCM) to efficiently improve the performance of the skyline calculation in the structured P2P networks, using a Distributed Caching Index (DCI) scheme and an advanced cache utilization strategy. The DO scheme is employed to efficiently locate the cache that can properly answer a future skyline query. Exploring the property of emended skyline, we can optimize the utilization of the cached results for answering future skyline queries. Extensive evaluations on both synthetic and real dataset show that our approach can significantly reduce both bandwidth consumption and communication cost, and greatly shorten the response time.

Selecting representative objects from a large-scale database is an essential task to understand the database. A skyline query is one of the popular methods for selecting representative objects. It retrieves a set of non-dominated objects. In this paper, we consider a distributed algorithm for computing skyline, which is efficient enough to handle “big data”. We have noticed the importance of “big data” and want to use it. On the other hand, we must take care of its privacy. In conventional distributed algorithms for computing a skyline query, we must disclose the sensitive values of each object of a private database to another for comparison. Therefore, the privacy of the objects is not preserved. However, such disclosures of sensitive information in conventional distributed database systems are not allowed in the modern privacy-aware computing environment. Recently several privacy-preserving skyline computation frameworks have been introduced. However, most of them use computationally expensive secure comparison protocol for comparing homomorphically encrypted data. In this work, we propose a novel and efficient approach for computing the skyline in a secure multi-party computing environment without disclosing the individual attributes’ value of the objects. We use a secure multi-party sorting protocol that uses the homomorphic encryption in the semi-honest adversary model for transforming each attribute value of the objects without changing their order on each attribute. To compute skyline we use the order of the objects on each attribute for comparing the dominance relationship among the objects. The security analysis confirms that the proposed framework can achieve multi-party skyline computation without leaking the sensitive attribute value to others. Besides that, our experimental results also validate the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed privacy-preserving skyline computation framework.

Skyline queries are useful in decision making applications. Skyline queries in highly mobile distributed environments have attracted many attentions recently due to the development of mobile internet device. The properties of distributed computing make skyline queries more complicated especially in any subspace. Conventional skyline algorithms do not support subspace skyline queries in distributed environment. In this paper, we focus on how to perform distributed skyline queries in any subspace according to user preference. So we propose a system model in a mobile and distributed environment. An efficient parallel algorithm for processing the Subspace Skyline Query (SSQ) using MapReduce is applied to the system model. This algorithm can report skyline points in any subspace. Meanwhile, a pruning strategy is also proposed in order to reduce the network communication and minimize the response time. We conduct experiments on real and synthetic data. Experimental results indicate that our SSQ algorithm is much more efficient. Furthermore, the pruning strategy can further improve the performance of the algorithm.

The skyline queries are often used in several recommendation applications. Most existing related works have focused on skyline computation in many multidimensional data. However, these works do not consider an interesting query generated from non-skyline point. In this paper, we propose a new query, called skyline minimum vector which finds the minimum vector for making a non-skyline point into a skyline. The skyline minimum vector means the minimum cost for becoming a skyline. We use the Manhattan distance between skyline and query point in order to evaluate the cost. Also, we propose basic algorithm and optimized algorithm for getting skyline minimum vector. The proposed query will be very useful in many decision-making applications.

Skyline queries help users make intelligent decisions over complex data, where different and often conflicting criteria are considered. A challenging problem is to support skyline queries in distributed environments, where data is scattered over independent sources. The query response time of skyline processing over distributed data depends on the amount of transferred data and the query processing cost at each server. In this paper, we propose AGiDS, a framework for efficient skyline processing over distributed data. Our approach reduces significantly the amount of transferred data, by using a grid-based data summary that captures the data distribution on each server. AGiDS consists of two phases to compute the result: in the first phase the querying server gathers the grid-based summary, whereas in the second phase a skyline request is sent only to the servers that may contribute to the skyline result set asking only for the points of non-dominated regions. We provide an experimental evaluation showing that our approach performs efficiently and outperforms existing techniques.

The skyline query is an efficient data analysis tool for multi-criteria decision making that has received significant attention in the database community. As multi-core architectures have gone mainstream, we present a new parallel skyline query algorithm that can be applied to multi-core and multiprocessor systems, to progressively return skyline points as they are identified efficiently. In this paper, we proposed a parallel skyline algorithm which can eliminate redundant computations and improve parallelism of the skyline query. Experimental results show that our algorithm successfully exploits the features of multiple cores to improve the performance of skyline computation for large high-dimensional datasets.

The skyline operator and its variants such as dynamic skyline and reverse skyline operators have attracted considerable attention recently due to their broad applications. However, computations of such operators are challenging today since there is an increasing trend of applications to deal with big data. For such data-intensive applications, the MapReduce framework has been widely used recently. In this paper, we propose efficient parallel algorithms for processing the skyline and its variants using MapReduce. We first build histograms to effectively prune out nonskyline (non-reverse skyline) points in advance. We next partition data based on the regions divided by the histograms and compute candidate (reverse) skyline points for each region independently using MapReduce. Finally, we check whether each candidate point is actually a (reverse) skyline point in every region independently. Our performance study confirms the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed algorithms.