Incrementally Maintaining Classification using an RDBMS

The proliferation of imprecise data has motivated both researchers and the database industry to push statistical techniques into relational database management systems (RDBMSs). We study algorithms to maintain model-based views for a popular statistical technique, classification, inside an RDBMS in the presence of updates to the training examples. We make three technical contributions: (1) An algorithm that incrementally maintains classification inside an RDBMS. (2) An analysis of the above algorithm that shows that our algorithm is optimal among all deterministic algorithms (and asymptotically within a factor of 2 of a nondeterministic optimal). (3) An index structure based on the technical ideas that underlie the above algorithm which allows us to store only a fraction of the entities in memory. We apply our techniques to text processing, and we demonstrate that our algorithms provide several orders of magnitude improvement over non-incremental approaches to classification on a variety of data sets: such as the Cora, UCI Machine Learning Repository data sets, Citeseer, and DBLife.