Automatic and Adaptive Learning for Relational Data Stream Clustering

Overview & Synopsis

The research work presented in this thesis concerns the development of unsupervised learning approaches adapted to large relational and dynamic data-sets. The combination of these three characteristics (size, complexity and evolution) is a major challenge in the field of data mining and few satisfactory solutions exist at the moment, despite the obvious needs of companies. This is a real challenge, because the approaches adapted to relational data have a quadratic complexity, unsuited to the analysis of dynamic data. We propose here two complementary approaches for the analysis of this type of data. The first approach is able to detect well-separated clusters from a signal created during an incremental reordering of the dissimilarity matrix, with no parameter to choose (e.g., the number of clusters). The second proposes to use support points among the objects in order to build a representation space to define representative prototypes of the clusters. Finally, we apply the proposed approaches to real-time profiling of connected users. Profiling tasks are designed to recognize the "state of mind" of users through their navigations on different web-sites.