Some recent results on data mining and search

Abstract

In this talk we review and survey some recent work and work in progress on data mining and web search. We discuss Latent Semantic Analysis and give conditions under which it is robust. We also consider the problem of collaborative filtering and show how spectral techniques can give a rigorous and robust justification for doing so. We consider the problems of web search and show how both Google and Klienberg’s algorithm are robust under a model of web generation, and how this model can be reasonably extended. We then give an algorithm that provably gives the correct result in this extended model. The results surveyed are joint work with Azar, Karlin, McSherry and Saia [2], and Achlioptas, Karlin and McSherry [1].