An intelligent, uncertainty driven aggregation scheme for streams of ordered sets

Abstract

Data streams management has attracted the attention of many researchers during the recent years. The reason is that numerous devices generate huge amounts of data demanding an efficient processing scheme for delivering high quality applications. Data are reported through streams and stored into a number of partitions. Separation techniques facilitate the parallel management of data while intelligent methods are necessary to manage these multiple instances of data. Progressive analytics over huge amounts of data could be adopted to deliver partial responses and, possibly, to save time in the execution of applications. An interesting research domain is the efficient management of queries over multiple partitions. Usually, such queries demand responses in the form of ordered sets of objects (e.g., top-k queries). These ordered sets include objects in a ranked order and require novel mechanisms for deriving responses based on partial results. In this paper, we study a setting of multiple data partitions and propose an intelligent, uncertainty driven decision making mechanism that aims to respond to streams of queries. Our mechanism delivers an ordered set of objects over a number of partial ordered subsets retrieved by each partition of data. We envision that a number of query processors are placed in front of each partition and report progressive analytics to a Query Controller (QC). The QC receives queries, assigns the task to the underlying processors and decides the right time to deliver the final ordered set to the application. We propose an aggregation model for deriving the final ordered set of objects and a Fuzzy Logic (FL) inference process. We present a Type-2 FL system that decides when the QC should stop aggregating partial subsets and return the final response to the application. We report on the performance of the proposed mechanism through the execution of a large set of experiments. Our results deal with the throughput of the QC, the quality of the final ordered set of objects and the time required for delivering the final response. © 2016, Springer Science+Business Media New York.