Discovery Science

Abstract

Ordering and ranking items of different types (observations, web pages, etc.) are important tasks in various applications, such as query processing and scientific data mining. We consider different problems of inferring total or partial orders from data, with special emphasis on applications to the seriation problem in paleontology. Seriation can be viewed as the task of ordering rows of a 0-1 matrix so that certain conditions hold. We review different approaches to this task, including spectral ordering methods, techniques for finding partial orders, and probabilistic models using MCMC methods. Joint work with Antti Ukkonen, Aris Gionis, Mikael Fortelius, Kai Puolamäki, and Jukka Jernvall.