PA212 Advanced Search Techniques for Large Scale Data Analytics

Faculty of Informatics
Spring 2025
Extent and Intensity
2/0/0. 2 credit(s) (plus extra credits for completion). Type of Completion: zk (examination).
In-person direct teaching
Teacher(s)
doc. RNDr. Jan Sedmidubský, Ph.D. (lecturer)
prof. Ing. Pavel Zezula, CSc. (lecturer)
Guaranteed by
doc. RNDr. Jan Sedmidubský, Ph.D.
Department of Machine Learning and Data Processing – Faculty of Informatics
Supplier department: Department of Machine Learning and Data Processing – Faculty of Informatics
Prerequisites
Knowledge of the basic principles of data processing is assumed.
Course Enrolment Limitations
The course is also offered to the students of the fields other than those the course is directly associated with.
fields of study / plans the course is directly associated with
Course objectives
The objective of the course is to explain the problems of information retrieval in large collections of unstructured data, such as text documents or multimedia objects. The main emphasis will be on describing the basic principles of distributed algorithms for processing large volumes of data, e.g., Locality Sensitive Hashing, MapReduce, or PageRank. The algorithms for processing stream data will be introduced as well. The students will also acquire practical experience by applying the presented algorithms to specific tasks.
Learning outcomes
After completing the course, students are able to:
  • Describe algorithmic-based differences between processing offline data collections and online data streams;
  • Understand the basic principles of distributed algorithms for processing large volumes of data;
  • Evaluate the results of algorithms by several metrics;
  • Apply presented algorithms, such as k-Means, Locality Sensitive Hashing, MapReduce, or PageRank, to specific tasks.
    • Syllabus
    • Introduction – what is searching, things useful to know
    • Support for distributed processing – distributed processing, MapReduce, performance evaluation
    • Retrieval operators and metrics – common similarity search operators, retrieval metrics for evaluating search results
    • Clustering – clustering in Euclidean and non-Euclidean spaces; hierarchical, k-means, and BFR clustering algorithms
    • Finding frequent item sets – counting frequent items; A-Priori and PCY algorithms
    • Finding similar items – near-neighbor search, shingling of documents, min-hashing, Locality Sensitive Hashing
    • Processing data streams – sampling data from a stream, queries over sliding windows, filtering a stream
    • Link analysis – PageRank, topic sensitive PageRank, link spam
    • Search applications – advertising on the web, recommender systems
    Literature
      recommended literature
    • P, Deepak and Prasad M. DESHPANDE. Operators for similarity search : semantics, techniques and usage scenarios. Cham: Springer, 2015, xi, 115. ISBN 9783319212562. info
    • LESKOVEC, Jurij, Anand RAJARAMAN and Jeffrey D. ULLMAN. Mining of massive datasets. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, xi, 467. ISBN 9781107077232. info
    • BAEZA-YATES, R. and Berthier de Araújo Neto RIBEIRO. Modern information retrieval : the concepts and technology behind search. 2nd ed. Harlow: Pearson, 2011, xxx, 913. ISBN 9780321416919. info
    Teaching methods
    Lectures with slides in English. The approach combines theory, algorithms, and practical examples.
    Assessment methods
    The final exam consists of only a written part. The student is asked several theoretical and practical questions to verify their knowledge obtained during the course lectures.
    Language of instruction
    English
    Further Comments
    The course is taught annually.
    The course is taught: every week.
    The course is also listed under the following terms Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Spring 2024.
    • Enrolment Statistics (Spring 2025, recent)
    • Permalink: https://is.muni.cz/course/fi/spring2025/PA212