Scalable Representative Instance Selection and Ranking

Finding a small set of representative instances for large datasets can bring various benefits to data mining practitioners so they can (1) build a learner superior to the one constructed from the whole massive data; and (2) avoid working on the whole original dataset all the time. We propose in this paper a Scalable Representative Instance Selection And Ranking (SRISTAR pronounced 3STAR) mechanism, which carries two unique features: (1) it provides a representative instance ranking list, so that users can always select instances from the top to the bottom, based on the number of examples they prefer; and (2) it investigates the behaviors of the underlying examples for instance selection, and the selection procedure tries to optimize the expected future error. Given a dataset, we first cluster instances into small data cells, each of which consists of instances with similar behaviors. Then we progressively evaluate data cells and their combinations, and order them into a list such that the learners built from the top cells are more accurate.