User modeling: Through statistical analysis and subspace learning

One of the challenges which must be faced in the field of the information processing is the need to cope with huge amounts of data. There exist many different environments in which large quantities of information are produced. For example, in a command-line interface, a computer user types thousands of commands which can hide information about the behavior of her/his. However, processing this kind of streaming data on-line is a hard problem. This paper addresses the problem of the classification of streaming data from a dimensionality reduction perspective. We propose to learn a lower dimensionality input model which best represents the data and improves the prediction performance versus standard techniques. The proposed method uses maximum dependence criteria as distance measurement and finds the transformation which best represents the command-line user. We also make a comparison between the dimensionality reduction approach and using the full dataset. The results obtained give some deeper understanding in advantages and drawbacks of using both perspectives in this user classifying environment. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.