On Distributed Fuzzy Decision Trees for Big Data

Abstract:

Fuzzy decision trees (FDTs) have shown to be an effective solution in the framework of fuzzy classification. The approaches proposed so far to FDT learning, however, have generally neglected time and space requirements. In this paper, we propose a distributed FDT learning scheme shaped according to the MapReduce programming model for generating both binary and multi-way FDTs from big data. The scheme relies on a novel distributed fuzzy discretizer that generates a strong fuzzy partition for each continuous attribute based on fuzzy information entropy. The fuzzy partitions are therefore used as input to the FDT learning algorithm, which employs fuzzy information gain for selecting the attributes at the decision nodes. We have implemented the FDT learning scheme on the Apache Spark framework. We have used ten real-world publicly available big datasets for evaluating the behavior of the scheme along three dimensions: i) performance in terms of classification accuracy, model complexity and execution time, ii) scalability varying the number of computing units and iii) ability to efficiently accommodate an increasing dataset size. We have demonstrated that the proposed scheme turns out to be suitable for managing big datasets even with modest commodity hardware support. Finally, we have used the distributed decision tree learning algorithm implemented in the MLLib library and the Chi-FRBCS-BigData algorithm, a MapReduce distributed fuzzy rule-based classification system, for comparative analysis.

Existing System:

A decision tree can be generated efficiently from very large datasets. The various techniques proposed in the literature can be roughly grouped into two categories, which are characterized by performing a pre-sorting of the data or by adopting approximate representations of the data such as samples and/or histograms [46]. While pre-sorting techniques are more accurate, they cannot accommodate very large datasets or streaming data [46]. One of the oldest approaches in the first category is SLIQ, proposed in [47]. SLIQ reduces decision tree learning time without loss in accuracy by exploiting a pre-sorting technique in the tree-growth phase. This technique is integrated with a breadth-first tree growing strategy to enable classification of disk-resident datasets.

Proposed System:

we propose a distributed fuzzy discretizer and a distributed FDT (DFDT) learning scheme upon the MapReduce programming model for managing big data. To the best of our knowledge, in the context of big data, no distributed discretizer for generating fuzzy partitions and no DFDT have been proposed in the literature. Our novel discretizer generates a strong fuzzy partition for each continuous attribute by using a purposely adapted distributed version of the well-known method proposed by Fayyad and Irani in [44]. The fuzzy partitions computed by the discretizer are used as input to the DFDT learning algorithm. We adopt and compare two different versions of the learning algorithm based on binary and multi-way splits, respectively. Both the versions employ the information gain computed in terms of fuzzy entropy for selecting the attribute to be adopted at each decision node.

Conclusions:

We have proposed a distributed fuzzy decision tree (FDT) learning scheme shaped according to the MapReduce programming model for generating both binary (FBDT) and multiway (FMDT) FDTs from big data. We have first introduced a novel distributed fuzzy discretizer, which generates strong fuzzy partitions for each continuous attribute based on fuzzy information entropy. Then, we have discussed a distributed implementation of an FDT learning algorithm, which employs the fuzzy information gain for selecting the attributes to be used in the decision nodes. We have implemented the FDT learning scheme on the Apache Spark framework. we believe that the work presented in this paper is the first extensive study on the application of FDTs to big data, considering both binary and multi-way splits. We expect that the experimental results can be used as baseline for future research in this field.

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