scholarly journals Open-Source’s Inspirations for Computational Social Science: Lessons from a Failed Analysis

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 231-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathaniel Poor

The questions we can ask currently, building on decades of research, call for advanced methods and understanding. We now have large, complex data sets that require more than complex statistical analysis to yield human answers. Yet as some researchers have pointed out, we also have challenges, especially in computational social science. In a recent project I faced several such challenges and eventually realized that the relevant issues were familiar to users of free and open-source software. I needed a team with diverse skills and knowledge to tackle methods, theories, and topics. We needed to iterate over the entire project: from the initial theories to the data to the methods to the results. We had to understand how to work when some data was freely available but other data that might benefit the research was not. More broadly, computational social scientists may need creative solutions to slippery problems, such as restrictions imposed by terms of service for sites from which we wish to gather data. Are these terms legal, are they enforced, or do our institutional review boards care? Lastly—perhaps most importantly and dauntingly—we may need to challenge laws relating to digital data and access, although so far this conflict has been rare. Can we succeed as open-source advocates have?

2016 ◽  
Vol 35 (10) ◽  
pp. 906-909 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brendon Hall

There has been much excitement recently about big data and the dire need for data scientists who possess the ability to extract meaning from it. Geoscientists, meanwhile, have been doing science with voluminous data for years, without needing to brag about how big it is. But now that large, complex data sets are widely available, there has been a proliferation of tools and techniques for analyzing them. Many free and open-source packages now exist that provide powerful additions to the geoscientist's toolbox, much of which used to be only available in proprietary (and expensive) software platforms.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikola Jovanovic ◽  
Alexander S Mikheyev

Traditional static publication formats make visualization, exploration and sharing of massive phylogenetic trees difficult. Web-based technologies, such as the Data Driven Document (D3) JavaScript library, exist to overcome such challenges by allowing interactive display of complex data sets. We here we an open-source web-based application that applies the power of D3 to the visualization of phylogenetic trees. Phylogeny.IO (http://phyloeny.io) displays trees together with a range of static (e.g., such as shapes and colors) and dynamic (e.g., pop-up text and images) annotations. Annotated trees can be shared as IFrame HTML objects easily embeddable in any web page.


Author(s):  
Nikola Jovanovic ◽  
Alexander S Mikheyev

Traditional static publication formats make visualization, exploration and sharing of massive phylogenetic trees difficult. Web-based technologies, such as the Data Driven Document (D3) JavaScript library, exist to overcome such challenges by allowing interactive display of complex data sets. We here we an open-source web-based application that applies the power of D3 to the visualization of phylogenetic trees. Phylogeny.IO (http://phyloeny.io) displays trees together with a range of static (e.g., such as shapes and colors) and dynamic (e.g., pop-up text and images) annotations. Annotated trees can be shared as IFrame HTML objects easily embeddable in any web page.


Author(s):  
Abou_el_ela Abdou Hussein

Day by day advanced web technologies have led to tremendous growth amount of daily data generated volumes. This mountain of huge and spread data sets leads to phenomenon that called big data which is a collection of massive, heterogeneous, unstructured, enormous and complex data sets. Big Data life cycle could be represented as, Collecting (capture), storing, distribute, manipulating, interpreting, analyzing, investigate and visualizing big data. Traditional techniques as Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) couldn’t handle big data because it has its own limitations, so Advancement in computing architecture is required to handle both the data storage requisites and the weighty processing needed to analyze huge volumes and variety of data economically. There are many technologies manipulating a big data, one of them is hadoop. Hadoop could be understand as an open source spread data processing that is one of the prominent and well known solutions to overcome handling big data problem. Apache Hadoop was based on Google File System and Map Reduce programming paradigm. Through this paper we dived to search for all big data characteristics starting from first three V's that have been extended during time through researches to be more than fifty six V's and making comparisons between researchers to reach to best representation and the precise clarification of all big data V’s characteristics. We highlight the challenges that face big data processing and how to overcome these challenges using Hadoop and its use in processing big data sets as a solution for resolving various problems in a distributed cloud based environment. This paper mainly focuses on different components of hadoop like Hive, Pig, and Hbase, etc. Also we institutes absolute description of Hadoop Pros and cons and improvements to face hadoop problems by choosing proposed Cost-efficient Scheduler Algorithm for heterogeneous Hadoop system.


Author(s):  
Avinash Navlani ◽  
V. B. Gupta

In the last couple of decades, clustering has become a very crucial research problem in the data mining research community. Clustering refers to the partitioning of data objects such as records and documents into groups or clusters of similar characteristics. Clustering is unsupervised learning, because of unsupervised nature there is no unique solution for all problems. Most of the time complex data sets require explanation in multiple clustering sets. All the Traditional clustering approaches generate single clustering. There is more than one pattern in a dataset; each of patterns can be interesting in from different perspectives. Alternative clustering intends to find all unlike groupings of the data set such that each grouping has high quality and distinct from each other. This chapter gives you an overall view of alternative clustering; it's various approaches, related work, comparing with various confusing related terms like subspace, multi-view, and ensemble clustering, applications, issues, and challenges.


Author(s):  
Phillip L. Manning ◽  
Peter L. Falkingham

Dinosaurs successfully conjure images of lost worlds and forgotten lives. Our understanding of these iconic, extinct animals now comes from many disciplines, not just the science of palaeontology. In recent years palaeontology has benefited from the application of new and existing techniques from physics, biology, chemistry, engineering, but especially computational science. The application of computers in palaeontology is highlighted in this chapter as a key area of development in studying fossils. The advances in high performance computing (HPC) have greatly aided and abetted multiple disciplines and technologies that are now feeding paleontological research, especially when dealing with large and complex data sets. We also give examples of how such multidisciplinary research can be used to communicate not only specific discoveries in palaeontology, but also the methods and ideas, from interrelated disciplines to wider audiences. Dinosaurs represent a useful vehicle that can help enable wider public engagement, communicating complex science in digestible chunks.


2010 ◽  
pp. 1797-1803
Author(s):  
Lisa Friedland

In traditional data analysis, data points lie in a Cartesian space, and an analyst asks certain questions: (1) What distribution can I fit to the data? (2) Which points are outliers? (3) Are there distinct clusters or substructure? Today, data mining treats richer and richer types of data. Social networks encode information about people and their communities; relational data sets incorporate multiple types of entities and links; and temporal information describes the dynamics of these systems. With such semantically complex data sets, a greater variety of patterns can be described and views constructed of the data. This article describes a specific social structure that may be present in such data sources and presents a framework for detecting it. The goal is to identify tribes, or small groups of individuals that intentionally coordinate their behavior—individuals with enough in common that they are unlikely to be acting independently. While this task can only be conceived of in a domain of interacting entities, the solution techniques return to the traditional data analysis questions. In order to find hidden structure (3), we use an anomaly detection approach: develop a model to describe the data (1), then identify outliers (2).


2022 ◽  
pp. 67-76
Author(s):  
Dineshkumar Bhagwandas Vaghela

The term big data has come due to rapid generation of data in various organizations. In big data, the big is the buzzword. Here the data are so large and complex that the traditional database applications are not able to process (i.e., they are inadequate to deal with such volume of data). Usually the big data are described by 5Vs (volume, velocity, variety, variability, veracity). The big data can be structured, semi-structured, or unstructured. Big data analytics is the process to uncover hidden patterns, unknown correlations, predict the future values from large and complex data sets. In this chapter, the following topics will be covered more in detail. History of big data and business analytics, big data analytics technologies and tools, and big data analytics uses and challenges.


Author(s):  
Paul Rippon ◽  
Kerrie Mengersen

Learning algorithms are central to pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, machine learning, data mining, and statistical learning. The term often implies analysis of large and complex data sets with minimal human intervention. Bayesian learning has been variously described as a method of updating opinion based on new experience, updating parameters of a process model based on data, modelling and analysis of complex phenomena using multiple sources of information, posterior probabilistic expectation, and so on. In all of these guises, it has exploded in popularity over recent years.


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