A formally based parallelization of data mining algorithms for multi-core systems

Abstract

We describe a novel, systematic approach to efficiently parallelizing data mining algorithms: starting with the representation of an algorithm as a sequential composition of functions, we formally transform it into a parallel form using higher-order functions for specifying parallelism. We implement the approach as an extension of the industrial-strength Java-based library Xelopes, and we illustrate its use by developing a multi-threaded Java program for the popular naive Bayes classification algorithm. In comparison with the popular MapReduce programming model, our resulting programs enable not only data-parallel, but also task-parallel implementation and a combination of both. Our experiments demonstrate an efficient parallelization and good scalability on multi-core processors.