To do this, we need fight data, so I crawled and parsed all the MMA fights from Sherdog.com. This data includes fighter profiles (birth date, weight, height, disciplines, training camp, location) and fight records (challenger, opponent, time, round, outcome, event). After some basic data cleaning, I had a dataset of 11,886 fight records, 1,390 of which correspond to the UFC.

I then trained a random forest classifier from this data to see if a state-of-the-art machine learning model can identify any winning and losing characteristics. Over cross-validation with 10 folds, the resulting model scored a surprisingly decent AUC score of 0.69; a AUC score closer to 0.5 would indicate that the model can’t predict winning fights any better than random or fair coin flips.

So there may be interesting patterns in this data … Feeling motivated, I ran exhaustive searches over the data to find feature combinations that indicate winning or losing behaviors. Many hours later, several dozens of such insights were found.

Here are the most interesting ones (stars indicate statistical significance at the 5% level):

Top UFC Insights

The main goal here is to demonstrate the effectiveness of data driven approaches for better understanding the patterns in a sport like MMA. The UFC could leverage these data mining approaches for coming up with fairer matches (dismiss fights that match obvious winning and losing biases). I don’t favor this, but given many fans want to see knockouts, the UFC could even use these approaches to design fights that will likely avoid decisions or submissions.

Anyways, there’s so much more analysis I’ve done (and haven’t done) over this data. Will post more results when cycles permit. Stay tuned.

Unfortunately, measuring outcomes is tough – there’s no data source that I know of that describes how all past high school students ended up. However, I thought it would be a fun experiment to approximate using LinkedIn data. I took eight top high schools in the Bay Area (see the table below) and ran a whole bunch of advanced LinkedIn search queries to find graduates from these high schools while also counting up their key outcomes like what colleges they graduated from, what companies they went on to work for, what industries are they in, what job titles have they earned, etc.

The results are quite interesting. Here are a few statistics:

College Statistics

• The top 5 high schools that have the largest share of users going to top private schools (Ivy League’s + Stanford + Caltech + MIT) are (1) Harker (2) Gunn (3) Saratoga (4) Lynbrook (5) Bellarmine.
• The top 5 high schools that have the largest share of users going to the top 3 UC’s (Berkeley, LA, San Diego) are (1) Mission (2) Gunn (3) Saratoga (4) Lynbrook (5) Leland.
• Although Harker has the highest share of users going to top privates (30%), their share of users going to the top UC’s is below average. It’s worth nothing that Harker’s tuition is the highest at $36K a year.
• Bellarmine, an all men’s high school with tuition of $15K a year, is below average in its share of users going on to top private universities as well as to the UC system.
• Gunn has the highest share of users (11%) going on to Stanford. That’s more than 2x the second place high school (Harker).
• Mission has the highest share of users (31%) going to the top 3 UC’s and to UC Berkeley alone (14%).

Career Statistics

• In rank order (1) Saratoga (2) Bellarmine (3) Leland have the biggest share of users which hold job titles that allude to leadership positions (CEO, VP, Manager, etc.).
• The highest share of lawyers come from (1) Bellarmine (2) Lynbrook (3) Leland. Gunn has 0 lawyers and Harker is second lowest at 6%.
• Saratoga has the best overall balance of users in each industry (median share of users).
• Hardware is fading – 5 schools (Leland, Gunn,  Harker, Mission, Lynbrook) have zero users in this industry.
• Harker has the highest share of its users in the Internet, Financial, and Medical industries.
• Harker has the lowest percentage of Engineers and below average share of users in the Software industry.
• Gunn has the highest share of users in the Software and Media industries.
• Harker high school is relatively new (formed in 1998), so its graduates are still early in the workforce. Leadership takes time to earn, so the leadership statistic is unfairly biased against Harker.

You can see all the stats I collected in the table below. Keep in mind that percentages correspond to the share of users from the high school that match that column’s criteria. Yellow highlights correspond to the best score; blue shaded boxes correspond to scores that are above average. There are quite a few caveats which I’ll note in more detail later, so take these results with a grain of salt. However, as someone who grew up in the Bay Area his whole life, I will say that many of these results make sense to me.

Just provide a link to a public LinkedIn profile and an email address and that’s it. The system will go find other folks on LinkedIn who best match that given profile and email back a summary of the results.

It leverages some very useful IR techniques along with a basic machine learned model to optimize the matching quality.

Some use cases:

• If I provide a link to a star engineer, I can find a bunch of folks like that person to go try to recruit. One could also use LinkedIn / Google search to find people, but sometimes it can be difficult to formulate the right query and may be easier to just pivot off an ideal candidate.

• I recently shared it with a colleague of mine who just graduated from college. He really wants to join a startup but doesn’t know of any (he just knows about the big companies like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, etc.). With this tool he found people who shared similar backgrounds and saw which small companies they work at.

• Generally browsing the people graph based on credentials as opposed to relationships. It seems to be a fun way to find like minded people around the world and see where they ended up. I’ve recently been using it to find advisors and customers based on folks I admire.

Anyways, just a fun application I developed on the side. It’s not perfect by any means but I figured it’s worth sharing.

It’s pretty compute intensive, so if you want to try it send mail to [contact at pplmatch dot com] to get your email address added to the list. Also, do make sure that the profiles you supply expose lots of text publicly – the more text the better the results.

A very basic experiment that pads URLs with messages:

Duplication

By compressing the data and comparing the before and after sizes, one can get a pretty decent understanding of the duplication factor. To do this, I extracted just the raw text messages, sorted them, and then ran gzip over the sorted set.

Compression ratio

>>> 284023259 / 739273532 bytes

0.38419238171778614

Typically, for text compression, gzip-like programs can achieve around 50% without the sort (and sorting typically helps), and here we get 38%. A standard text corpus consists of much larger document sizes, so it’s interesting to see a similar or larger duplication factor for tweets.

We can dive even deeper into this area by analyzing the term overlap statistics to measure near duplication, or messages that aren’t necessarily identical but are close enough.

To do this, I first cleaned the text (removed stopwords, stemmed terms, normalized case). Interesting, after cleaning the text, the average number of tokens for a message is just 6.28, or 2.5x the size of a standard web search query.

Then, I employed consistent term sampling to select N representatives for each cleaned message and coalesced the representatives together as a single key. By comparing the total number of unique keys to messages, one can infer the near duplication factor. Also, the higher the N, the higher the threshold is to match (so N >= 6, 6 being the average number of tokens per message, probably means that two messages that generate the same key are exact duplicates).

You’ll notice N >=6 converges around 84%, implying that after cleaning the text, 16% of the messages exactly match some other message. Additionally, when N = 2 (or requiring 2 / 6 tokens or 33% of the text on average) to match, 45% of the messages collide with other messages in the corpus. At N = 2, matching often means the messages discuss the same general topic, but aren’t close near duplicates.

URLs

URLs are present in ~18% of the tweets

Of those, ~65% of the URLs are unique

70K Unique Domains covering 2M URLS

Top Domains:

['bit.ly', 'tinyurl.com', 'twitpic.com', 'is.gd', 'myloc.me', 'ow.ly', 'ustre.am', 'cli.gs', 'tr.im', 'plurk.com', 'ff.im', 'tumblr.com', 'yfrog.com', '140mafia.com', 'u.mavrev.com', 'twurl.nl', 'tweeterfollow.com', 'mypict.me', 'viagracan.com', 'vipfollowers.com', 'morefollowers.net', 'digg.com', 'tweeteradder.com', 'ping.fm', 'tiny.cc', 'followersnow.com', 'short.to', 'twit.ac', 'snipr.com', 'wefollow.com', 'tweet.sg', 'url4.eu', 'the-twitter-follow-train.info', 'fwix.com', 'budurl.com', 'su.pr', 'shar.es', 'tinychat.com', 'snipurl.com', 'loopt.us', 'migre.me', 'flic.kr', 'myspace.com', 'snurl.com', 'twitgoo.com', 'zshare.net', 'post.ly', 'bkite.com', 'yes.com', 'flickr.com', 'twitter.com', 'artistsforschapelle.com', '140army.com', 'youtube.com', 'x.imeem.com', 'pic.gd', 'TwitterBackgrounds.com', 'raptr.com', 'twt.gs', 'twitthis.com', 'mobypicture.com', 'tobtr.com', 'ad.vu', 'sml.vg', 'rubyurl.com', 'tinylink.com', 'redirx.com', 'a2a.me', 'eCa.sh', 'vimeo.com', 'meadd.com', 'hotjobs.yahoo.com', 'doiop.com', 'myurl.in', 'urlpire.com', 'buzzup.com', 'freead.im', 'youradder.com', 'facebook.com', 'adf.ly', 'justin.tv', 'twitvid.com', 'adjix.com', 'twcauses.com', 'lkbk.nu', 'tlre.us', 'htxt.it', 'stickam.com', 'twubs.com', 'isy.gs', 'reverbnation.com', 'news.bbc.co.uk', 'sn.im', 'twibes.com', 'ustream.tv', 'trim.su', 'hashjobs.com', 'blogtv.com', 'jobs-cb.de', 'xsaimex.com']

Retweets

~4% of messages are retweets

Replied @Users

~1M total replied-to users in this data set

37% of tweets contain ‘@x’ terms

Most Popular Replied-to Users (almost all celebrities):

['@mileycyrus', '@jonasbrothers', '@ddlovato', '@mitchelmusso', '@donniewahlberg', '@souljaboytellem', '@tommcfly', '@addthis', '@officialtila', '@johncmayer', '@shanedawson', '@bowwow614', '@jordanknight', '@ryanseacrest', '@perezhilton', '@jonathanrknight', '@petewentz', '@tweetmeme', '@adamlambert', '@david_henrie', '@dealsplus', '@dwighthoward', '@iamdiddy', '@lancearmstrong', '@songzyuuup', '@imeem', '@blakeshelton', '@dannymcfly', '@lilduval', '@selenagomez', '@markhoppus', '@yelyahwilliams', '@therealpickler', '@stephenfry', '@mrtweet.', '@taylorswift13', '@michaelsarver1', '@davidarchie', '@the_real_shaq', '@tyrese4real', '@britneyspears', '@106andpark', '@ashleytisdale', '@mariahcarey', '@kimkardashian', '@wale', '@mashable', '@programapanico', '@therealjordin', '@listensto', '@misskeribaby', '@alyssa_milano', '@alexalltimelow', '@aplusk', '@thisisdavina', '@breakingnews:', '@peterfacinelli', '@truebloodhbo', '@mgiraudofficial', '@tonyspallelli', '@mtv', '@jackalltimelow', '@dfizzy', '@youngq', '@tomfelton', '@pooch_dog', '@jonaskevin', '@princesammie', '@nkotb', '@christianpior', '@cthagod', '@johnlloydtaylor', '@neilhimself', '@moontweet', '@katyperry', '@danilogentili', '@mchammer', '@rainnwilson', '@joeymcintyre', '@30secondstomars', '@phillyd', '@heidimontag', '@mrpeterandre', '@andyclemmensen', '@crystalchappell', '@kevindurant35', '@huckluciano', '@dannygokey', '@jaketaustin', '@revrunwisdom', '@jamesmoran', '@musewire', '@dannywood', '@nickiminaj', '@akgovsarahpalin', '@terrencej106', '@mashable:', '@drewryanscott', '@mrtweet', '@necolebitchie', '@lilduval:', '@willie_day26', '@kirstiealley', '@betthegame', '@radiomsn', '@alancarr', '@rafinhabastos', '@krisallen4real', '@iamjericho', '@breakingnews', '@babygirlparis', '@ladygaga', '@chris_daughtry', '@hypem', '@danecook', '@imcudi', '@jeepersmedia', '@buckhollywood', '@kimmyt22', '@giulianarancic', '@chrisbrogan', '@nasa', '@addtoany', '@nickcarter', '@debbiefletcher', '@marcoluque', '@shaundiviney', '@ogochocinco', '@twitter', '@eddieizzard', '@youngbillymays', '@real_ron_artest', '@pink', '@laurenconrad', '@rubarrichello', '@ianjamespoulter', '@liltwist', '@teyanataylor', '@dougiemcfly', '@theellenshow', '@robkardashian', '@sherrieshepherd', '@justinbieber', '@paulaabdul', '@jason_manford', '@jaredleto', '@tracecyrus', '@itsonalexa', '@ddlovato:', '@khloekardashian', '@revrunwisdom:', '@solangeknowles', '@allison4realzzz', '@nickjonas', '@reply', '@anarbor', '@donlemoncnn', '@gfalcone601', '@moonfrye', '@symphnysldr', '@iamspectacular', '@honorsociety', '@questlove', '@guykawasaki', '@dawnrichard', '@_maxwell_', '@somaya_reece', '@mandyyjirouxx', '@teemwilliams', '@greggarbo', '@pennjillette', '@mikeyway', '@matthardybrand', '@iamjonwalker', '@andyroddick', '@kohnt01', '@chris_gorham', '@seankingston', '@joshgroban', '@mousebudden', '@misskatieprice', '@spencerpratt', '@wilw', '@jgshock', '@swear_bot', '@joelmadden', '@techcrunch', '@americanwomannn', '@kelly__rowland', '@mionzera', '@astro_127', '@_@', '@spam', '@sookiebontemps', '@drakkardnoir', '@noh8campaign', '@kayako', '@trvsbrkr', '@qbkilla', '@mw55', '@guykawasaki:', '@donttrythis', '@cv31', '@liljjdagreat', '@tiamowry', '@nickensimontwit', '@holdemtalkradio', '@bradiewebbstack', '@nytimes', '@riskybizness23', '@radityadika', '@adrienne_bailon', '@riccklopes', '@jessicasimpson', '@sportsnation', '@jasonbradbury', '@huffingtonpost', '@oceanup', '@gilbirmingham', '@iconic88', '@the', '@thebrandicyrus', '@gordela', '@thedebbyryan', '@jessemccartney', '@?', '@caiquenogueira', '@celsoportiolli', '@shontelle_layne', '@calvinharris', '@chattyman', '@ali_sweeney', '@anamariecox', '@joshthomas87', '@emilyosment', '@nasa:', '@sevinnyne6126', '@thebiggerlights', '@theboygeorge', '@jbarsodmg', '@goldenorckus', '@warrenwhitlock', '@bobbyedner', '@myfabolouslife', '@descargaoficial', '@ochonflcinco85', '@ninabrown', '@billycurrington', '@oprah', '@junior_lima', '@asherroth', '@starbucks', '@jason_pollock', '@intanalwi', '@harrislacewell', '@serenajwilliams', '@kevinruddpm', '@bigbrotherhoh', '@oliviamunn', '@chamillionaire', '@tamekaraymond', '@teamwinnipeg', '@littlefletcher', '@piercethemind', '@brookandthecity', '@iranbaan:', '@tonyrobbins', '@maestro', '@glennbeck', '@1omarion', '@nadhiyamali', '@slimthugga', '@jason_mraz', '@profbrendi', '@djaaries', '@juanestwiter', '@davegorman', '@zackalltimelow', '@mamajonas', '@itschristablack', '@skydiver', '@gigva', '@currensy_spitta', '@paulwallbaby', '@rpattzproject', '@petewentz:', '@rodrigovesgo', '@drdrew', '@sportsguy33', '@cthagod:', '@hollymadison123', '@mjjnews', '@itsbignicholas', '@_supernatural_', '@santoevandro', '@demar_derozan', '@marthastewart', '@billganz62', '@oodle', '@davidleibrandt']

Hashtags

~7% of messages contain hashtags

Total Unique Hashtags found: ~94k

Top Hashtags:

['#lies', '#fb', '#musicmonday', '#truth', '#iranelection', '#moonfruit', '#tendance', '#jobs', '#ihavetoadmit', '#mariomarathon', '#140mafia', '#tcot', '#zyngapirates', '#followfriday', '#spymaster', '#ff', '#1', '#sotomayor', '#turnon', '#notagoodlook', '#tweetmyjobs', '#hiring:', '#iran', '#fun140', '#jesus', '#72b381.', '#quote', '#tinychat', '#neda', '#militarymon', '#gr88', '#trueblood', '#fail', '#news', '#140army', '#livestrong', '#noh8', '#wpc09', '#music', '#turnoff', '#unacceptable', '#twables', '#masterchef', '#noh84kradison', '#writechat', '#job', '#squarespace', '#michaeljackson', '#2', '#nothingpersonal', '#iphone', '#ala2009', '#mj', '#tdf', '#blogtalkradio', '#mlb', '#1stdraftmovielines', '#p2', '#secretagent', '#tlot', '#72b381', '#honduras', '#twitter', '#jtv', '#tehran', '#gorillapenis', '#porn', '#bb11', '#sotoshow', '#brazillovesatl', '#google', '#oneandother', '#bb10', '#chucknorris', '#cmonbrazil', '#agendasource', '#travel', '#ashes', '#dumbledore', '#freeschapelle', '#tl', '#dealsplus', '#nsfw', '#entourage', '#tech', '#hottest100', '#3693dh...', '#torchwood', '#design', '#teaparty', '#love', '#dontyouhate', '#mileycyrus', '#sgp', '#harrypottersequels', '#peteandinvisiblechildren', '#stopretweets', '#tscc', '#wimbledon', '#hive', '#cubs', '#3', '#redsox', '#photography', '#voss', '#snods', '#lol', '#socialmedia', '#gop', '#health', '#esriuc', '#green', '#follow', '#echo!', '#obama', '#digg', '#shazam', '#hhrs', '#video', '#moonfruit.', '#swineflu', '#politics', '#ebuyer683', '#umad', '#quizdostandup', '#thankyoumichael', '#blogchat', '#wordpress', '#3693dh', '#haiku', '#ttparty', '#lastfm:', '#healthcare', '#hcr', '#ecgc', '#seo', '#apple', '#chuck', '#wine', '#sammie', '#h1n1', '#marketing', '#twitition', '#happybirthdaymitchel18', '#cnn', '#lie', '#rt:', '#art', '#nasa', '#blog', '#quotes', '#bruno', '#business', '#palin', '#mw2', '#hcsm', '#harrypotter', '#4', '#lastfm', '#askclegg', '#photo', '#jobfeedr', '#lgbt', '#lies:', '#ihavetoadmit.i', '#jamlegend,', '#truthbetold', '#mcfly', '#microsoft', '#fashion', '#tweetphoto', '#ebuyer167201', '#noh84adison', '#5', '#mets', '#china', '#bigprize', '#whythehell', '#money', '#sophiasheart', '#finance', '#michael', '#f1', '#adamlambert100k', '#web', '#urwashed', '#moonfruit!', '#1:', '#kayako', '#lies.', '#thankyouaaron', '#food', '#wow', '#moonfruit,', '#facebook', '#ebuyer291', '#ecomonday', '#ihave', '#happybdaydenise', '#postcrossing', '#ichc', '#912', '#demilovatolive', '#gijoemoviefan', '#funny', '#media', '#meowmonday', '#israel', '#blogger', '#forasarney', '#tv', '#topgear', '#chrisisadouche', '#stlcards', '#wec09', '#forex', '#aots1000', '#celebrity', '#dwarffilmtitles', '#6', '#yeg', '#slaughterhouse', '#nfl', '#photog', '#ny', '#firstdraftmovies', '#ufc', '#reddit', '#free', '#iwish', '#etsy', '#rulez', '#sports', '#icmillion', '#mmot', '#webdesign', '#deals', '#moonfruit?', '#pawpawty', '#twitterfahndung', '#billymaystribute', '#sytycd', '#runkeeper', '#scotus', '#yoconfieso', '#mariomarathon,', '#musicmondays', '#lies,', '#findbob', '#realestate', '#sohrab', '#sales', '#metal', '#runescape', '#hypem', '#threadless', '#gay', '#isyouserious', '#hollywood,', '#2:', '#ca,', '#golf', '#diadorock', '#newyork,', '#meteor', '#dailyquestion', '#photoshop', '#saveiantojones', '#musicmonday:', '#rock', '#sex', '#mlbfutures', '#ilove', '#mikemozart', '#nascar', '#indico', '#crossfitgames', '#gratitude', '#quote:', '#creativetechs', '#truth:', '#sharepoint', '#mkt', '#why', '#bigbrother', '#tam7', '#ihate', '#futureruby', '#slickrick', '#105.3', '#youareinatl', '#vegan', '#dontletmefindout', '#imustadmit', '#7', '#twitterafterdark', '#sunnyfacts', '#gilad', '#japan', '#iremember', '#97.3', '#puffdaddy', '#blogher', '#ade2009', '#aaliyah', '#alfredosms', '#95.1', '#truth,', '#twine', '#hiring']

Questions

Hard to infer exactly whether a message is a question or not, so I ran a couple of different filters:

5W’s, H, ? present ANYWHERE in tweet:

0.102789281948 or 10%

5W’s, H first token or ? last token:

0.0238229662219 or 2%

Just ? ANYWHERE in tweet:

0.0040984928533 or 0.4%

Users

Discovered ~2M unique users

Top Sending Users (many bots):

['followermonitor', 'Tweet_Words', 'currentcet', 'currentutc', 'whattimeisitnow', 'ItIsNow', 'ThinkingStiff', 'otvrecorder', 'delicious50', 'Porngus', 'craigslistjobs', 'GorPen', 'hashjobs', 'TransAlchemy2', 'bot_theta', 'CHRISVOSS', 'bot_iota', 'bot_kappa', 'TIPAS', 'VeolaJBanner', 'StacyDWatson', 'LMAObot', 'SarahJSlonecker', 'AllisonMRussell', 'bot_eta', 'SandraHOakley', 'bot_psi', 'bot_tau', 'LoreleiRMercer', 'bot_zeta', 'bot_gamma', 'bot_sigma', 'bot_lambda', 'bot_pi', 'bot_epsilon', 'bot_nu', 'bot_rho', 'bot_omicron', 'bot_khi', 'LindaTYoung', 'mensrightsindia', 'bot_omega', 'bot_ksi', 'bot_delta', 'bot_alpha', 'bot_phi', 'CindaDJenkins', 'bot_mu', 'ImogeneDPetit', 'bot_upsilon', 'OPENLIST_CA', 'openlist', 'isygs', 'dq_jumon', 'gamingscoop', 'MildredSLogan', 'ObiWanKenobi_', 'pulseSearch', 'MaryEVo', 'ImeldaGMcward', 'MaryJNewman', 'SharonTForde', 'LoriJCornelius', 'BrandyWPulliam', 'RhondaTLopez', 'AprilKOropeza', 'CarolETrotman', 'SusanATouvell', 'dinoperna', 'buzzurls', '_Freelance_', 'DrSnooty', 'illstreet', 'bibliotaph_eyes', 'loc4lhost', 'bsiyo', 'BOTHOUSE', 'post_ads', 'qazkm', 'frugaldonkey', 'free_post', 'groovera', 'wonkawonkawonka', 'ForksGirlBella', 'casinopokera', 'dermdirectoryny', 'Yoowalk_chat', 'mstehr', 'hashgoogle', 'perry1949', 'ensiz_news', 'Bezplatno_net', 'timesmirror', 'work_freelance', 'cockbot', 'pdurham', 'bombtter_raw', 'ocha1', 'AlairAneko24', 'HaiIAmDelicious', 'Freshestjobs', 'fast_followers', 'LeadsForFree', 'RideOfYourLife', 'AlastairBotan30', 'helpmefast25', 'TheMLMWizard', 'uitrukken', 'adoptedALICE', 'TKATI', 'ezadsncash', 'tweetshelp', 'LAmetro_traffic', 'thinkpozzitive', 'StarrNeishaa', 'AldenCho36', 'JobHits', 'wootboot', 'smacula', 'faithclubdotnet', 'DmitriyVoronov', 'brownthumbgirl', 'NYCjobfeed', 'hfradiospacewx', 'FakeeKristenn', 'MLBDAILYTIMES', 'wildingp', 'JacksonsReview', 'EarthTimesPR', 'friedretweet', 'Wealthy23', 'RokpoolFM', 'HDOLLAZ', '_MrSpacely', 'Bestdocnyc', 'Rabidgun', 'flygatwick', 'live_china', 'friendlinks', 'retweetinator', 'iamamro', 'thayferreira', 'AldisDai39', 'AndersHana60', 'nonstopNEWS', 'VivaLaCash', 'TravelNewsFeeds', 'vuelosplus', 'threeporcupines', 'DemiAuzziefan', 'worldofprint', 'KevinEdwardsJr', 'REDDITSPAMMOR', 'NatValentine', 'ChanelLebrun', 'nowbot', 'hollyswansonUK', 'youngrhome', 'M_Abricot', 'thefakemandyv', 'scrapbookingpas', 'Naughtytimes', 'Opcode1300_bot', 'tellsecret', 'tboogie937', 'Climber_IT', 'comlist', 'with_a_smile', 'USN_retired', 'Climber_EngJobs', 'Climber_Finance', 'Climber_HRJobs', 'intanalwi', 'Climber_Sales', 'nadhiyamali', 'wonderfulquotes', 'MRAustria', 'O2Q', 'GL0', 'SookieBonTemps', 'MRSchweiz', 'latinasabor', 'nineleal', 'casservice', 'AltonGin54', 'KulerFeed', '_cesaum', 'HFMONAIR', 'DeeOnDreeYah', 'rockstalgica', 'iamword', 'rpattzproject', 'madblackcatcom', 'ftfradio', 'marciomtc', 'SocialNetCircus', 'AnotherYearOver', 'ichig', 'tcikcik', 'HelenaMarie210', 'mrbax0', 'SWBot', 'DayTrends', '_Embry_Call_', 'eProducts24', 'The_Sims_3', 'tom_ssa', 'woxy_vintage', 'urbanmusic2000', 'dopeguhxfresh', 'erections', 'DudeBroChill', 'lookingformoney', 'drnschneider', 'MosesMaimonides', '92Blues', 'elarmelar', 'rock937fm', 'sonicfm', 'erikadotnet', 'sky0311', 'weqx', 'brandamc', 'Hot106', 'woxy_live', 'ksopthecowboy', 'vixalius', 'cogourl', 'Cashintoday', 'Andrewdaflirt', 'oodle', 'mkephart25', 'doomed', 'spotifyuri', 'mangelat', 'Cody_K', 'swayswaystacey', 'KLLY953', 'onlaa', 'Ginger_Swan', 'Call_Embry', 'conservatweet', 'weerinlelystad', 'ruhanirabin', 'tmgadops', 'wakemeupinside1', 'horaoficial', 'xstex', 'franzidee', 'tommytrc', 'khopmusic', 'tez19', 'GaryGotnought', 'UnemployKiller', 'felloff', 'Kalediscope', 'TheRealSherina', 'jasonsfreestuff', 'johnkennick', 'sel_gomezx3', 'OE3', 'AddisonMontg', '_rosieCAKES', 'neownblog', 'PrinceP23', 'ontd_fluffy', 'USofAl', 'Kacizzle88', 'somalush', 'FrankieNichelle', 'jiva_music', 'itz_cookie', 'soundOfTheTone', 'knowheremom', 'Jayme1988', 'TrafficPilot', 'tweetalot', 'TheStation1610', 'lasvegasdivorce', '1000_LINKS_NOW2', 'KeepOnTweeting', 'uFreelance', 'ChocoKouture', 'Magic983', 'SnarkySharky', 'agthekid', 'cashinnow', 'jamokie', 'jessicastanely', 'Q103Albany', 'GPGTwit', 'xAmberNicholex', 'wjtlplaylist', 'sjAimee', 'chrisduhhh', 'failbus', '1stwave', 'RichardBejah', 'nyanko_love']

Web Queries Overlap

How much overlap is there between tweets and trending web search queries?

I took the top trending queries during the days of my twitter crawl from Google Trends, then query expanded each trending query until the length was 6 tokens so as to equalize the average lengths. Then, I simply counted how many tweets match at least 2 (cleaned) tokens of any of these query-expanded trends:

0.0185654981775 or 2%

That’s it for now. I have some more stats but need a bit more time to clean those up before publishing here.

Notes

Can’t distribute my data set unfortunately, but it shouldn’t take too long to assemble a comparable set via Twitter’s spritzer feed – that’ll probably be more useful as it’ll be more update-to-date than the one I analyzed here. Feel free to pull my stats off if you find them useful (top hashtags and users are in JSON format).

How does it work? BOSS offers delicious metadata for many search results that have been saved in delicious. This includes top tags, their frequencies, and the number of user saves. Additionally, BOSS makes available an option to retrieve extended search result abstracts. So, to generate a training set, I first build up a query list (100 delicious popular tags), search each query through BOSS (asking for 500 results per), and filter the results to just those that have delicious tags.

Basically, the collection logically looks like this:

[(result_1, delicious_tags), (result_2, delicious_tags) …]

Then, I invert the collection on the tags while retaining each result’s extended abstract and title fields (concatenated together)

This logically looks like this now:

[(tag_1, result_1.abstract + result_1.title), (tag_2, result_1.abstract + result_1.title), …, (tag_1, result_2.abstract + result_2.title), (tag_2, result_2.abstract + result_2.title) …]

To build a model comparing 2 tags, the system selects pairs from the above collection that have matching tags, converts the abstract + title text into features, and then passes the resulting pairs over to LibSVM to train a binary classification model.

Here’s how it works:

tagger viksi$ python gen_training_test_set.py liberal conservative

tagger viksi$ python autosvm.py training_data.txt test_data.txt

__Searching / Training Best Model

____Trained A Better Model: 60.5263

____Trained A Better Model: 68.4211

__Predicting Test Data

__Evaluation

____Right: 16

____Wrong: 4

____Total: 20

____Accuracy: 0.800000

get_training_test_set finds the pairs with matching tags and split those results into a training (80% of the pairs) and test set (20%), saving the data as training_data.txt and test_data.txt respectively. autosvm learns the best model (brute forcing the parameters for you – could be handy by itself as a general learning tool) and then applies it to the test set, reporting how well it did. In the above case, the system achieved 80% accuracy over 20 test instances.

Here’s another way to use it:

tagger viksi$ python classify.py apple microsoft bill gates steve ballmer windows vista xp

microsoft

tagger viksi$ python classify.py apple microsoft steve jobs ipod iphone macbook

apple

classify combines the above steps into an application that, given two tags and some text, will return which tag more likely describes the text. Or, in command line form, ‘python classify.py [tag1] [tag2] [some free text]’ => ‘tag1’ or ‘tag2’

My main goal here is not to build a perfect experiment or classifier (see caveats below), but to show a proof of concept of how BOSS or open search can be leveraged to build intelligent applications. BOSS isn’t just a search API, but really a general data API for powering any application that needs to party on a lot of the world’s knowledge.

I’ve open sourced the code here:

http://github.com/zooie/tagger

Caveats

Although the total lines of code is ~200 lines, the system is fairly state-of-the-art as it employs LibSVM for its learning model. However, this classifier setup has several caveats due to my time constraints and goals, as my main intention for this example was to show the awesomeness of the BOSS data. For example, training and testing on abstracts and titles means the top features will probably be inclusive of the query, so the test set may be fairly easy to score well on as well as not be representative of real input data. I did later add code to remove query related features from the test set and the accuracy seemed to dip just slightly. For classify.py, the ‘some free text’ input needs to be fairly large (about an extended abstract’s size) to be more accurate. Another caveat is what happens when both tags have been used to label a particular search result. The current system may only choose one tag, which may incur an error depending on what’s selected in the test set. Furthermore, the features I’m using are super simple and can be greatly improved with TFIDF scaling, normalization, feature selection (mutual information gain), etc. Also, more training / test instances (and check the distribution of the labels), baselines and evaluation measures should be tested.

I could have made this code a lot cleaner and shorter if I just used LibSVM’s python interface, but I for some reason forgot about that and wrote up scripts that parsed the stdout messages of the binaries to get something working fast (but dirty).

I won’t rehash too much of the delicious blog post as that describes the motivation and idea in detail, but the basic idea was to advance and apply the TweetNews model to the latest stream of delicious bookmarks. The result is what we feel to be a pretty relevant and fresh (updates every minute or so) homepage. Please check it out and bookmark it (no pun intended). Just a simple start to hopefully better surfacing of content on delicious – expect more updates soon.

delicious also greatly advanced its search experience and sharing options in this release. You can learn more about it from the release posts here and soon here.

Motivation

Later this month we will be presenting a half day tutorial on Open Search at SIGIR. It’ll basically focus on how to use open source software and cloud services for building and quickly prototyping advanced search applications. Open Search isn’t just about building a Google-like search box on a free technology stack, but encouraging the community to extend and embrace search technology to improve the relevance of any application.

For example, one non-search application of BOSS leveraged the Spelling service to spell correct video comments before handing them off to their Spam filter. The Spelling correction process normalizes popular words that spammers intentionally misspell to get around spam models that rely on term statistics, and thus, can increase spam detection accuracy.

We have split up our upcoming talk into two sections:

• Services: Open Search Web APIs (Yahoo! BOSS, Twitter, Bing, and Google AJAX Search), interesting mashup examples, ranking models and academic research that leverage or could benefit from such services.

• Software: How to use popular open source packages for vertical indexing your own data.

While researching for the Software section, I was quite surprised by the number of open source vertical search solutions I found:

• Lucene (Nutch, Solr, Hounder), Sphinx, zettair, Terrier, Galago, Minnion, MG4J, Wumpus, RDBMS (mysql, sqlite), Indri, Xapian, grep …

And I was even more surprised by the lack of comparisons between these solutions. Many of these platforms advertise their performance benchmarks, but they are in isolation, use different data sets, and seem to be more focused on speed as opposed to say relevance.

The best paper I could find that compared performance and relevance of many open source search engines was Middleton+Baeza’07, but the paper is quite old now and didn’t make its source code and data sets publicly available.

So, I developed a couple of fun, off the wall experiments to test (for building code examples – this is just a simple/quick evaluation and not for SIGIR – read disclaimer in the conclusion section) some of the popular vertical indexing solutions. Here’s a table of the platforms I selected to study, with some high level feature breakdowns:

High level feature comparison among the vertical search solutions I studied; The support rating and scale are based on information I collected from web sites and conversations. I tested each solution's latest stable release as of this week (Indri is TODO).

One key design decision I made was not to change any numerical tuning parameters. I really wanted to test “Out of the Box” performance to simulate the common developer scenario. Plus, it takes forever to optimize parameters fairly across multiple platforms and different data sets esp. for an over-the-weekend benchmark (see disclaimer in the Conclusion section).

Also, I tried my best to write each experiment natively for each platform using the expected library routines or binary commands.

Twitter Experiment

For the first experiment, I wanted to see how well these platforms index Twitter data. Twitter is becoming very mainstream, and its real time nature and brevity differs greatly from traditional web content (which these search platforms are overall more tailored for) so its data should make for some interesting experiments.

So I proceeded to crawl Twitter to generate a sample data set. After about a full day and night, I had downloaded ~1M tweets (~10/second).

But before indexing, I did some quick analysis of my acquired Twitter data set:

# of Tweets: 968,937

Indexable Text Size (user, name, text message): 92MB

Average Tweet Size: 12 words

Types of Tweets based on simple word filters:

Out of a 1M sample, what types of Tweets do we find? Unique Users means that there were ~600k users that authored all of the 1M tweets in this sample.

Very interesting stats here – especially the high percentage of tweets that seem to be asking questions. Could Twitter (or an application) better serve this need?

Here’s a table comparing the indexing performance over this Twitter data set across the select vertical search solutions:

Indexing 1M twitter messages on a variety of open source search solutions.

Lucene was the only solution that produced an index that was smaller than the input data size. Shaves an additional 5 megabytes if one runs it in optimize mode, but at the consequence of adding another ten seconds to indexing. sphinx and zettair index the fastest. Interestingly, I ran zettair in big-and-fast mode (which sucks up 300+ megabytes of RAM) but it ran slower by 3 seconds (maybe because of the nature of tweets). Xapian ran 5x slower than sqlite (which stores the raw input data in addition to the index) and produced the largest index file sizes. The default index_text method in Xapian stores positional information, which blew the index size to 529 megabytes. One must use index_text_without_positions to make the size more reasonable. I checked my Xapian code against the examples and documentation to see if I was doing something wrong, but I couldn’t find any discrepancies. I also included a column about development issues I encountered. zettair was by far the easiest to use (simple command line) but required transforming the input data into a new format. I had some text issues with sqlite (also needs to be recompiled with FTS3 enabled) and sphinx given their strict input constraints. sphinx also requires a conf file which took some searching to find full examples of. Lucene, zettair, and Xapian were the most forgiving when it came to accepting text inputs (zero errors).

Measuring Relevancy: Medical Data Set

While this is a fun performance experiment for indexing short text, this test does not measure search performance and relevancy.

To measure relevancy, we need judgment data that tells us how relevant a document result is to a query. The best data set I could find that was publicly available for download (almost all of them require mailing in CD’s) was from the TREC-9 Filtering track, which provides a collection of 196,403 medical journal references – totaling ~300MB of indexable text (titles, authors, abstracts, keywords) with an average of 215 tokens per record. More importantly, this data set provides judgment data for 63 query-like tasks in the form of “<task, document, 2|1|0 rating>” (2 is very relevant, 1 is somewhat relevant, 0 is not rated). An example task is “37 yr old man with sickle cell disease.” To turn this into a search benchmark, I treat these tasks as OR’ed queries. To measure relevancy, I compute the Average DCG across the 63 queries for results in positions 1-10.

Performance and Relevancy marks on the TREC-9 across select vertical search solutions.

With this larger data set (3x larger than the Twitter one), we see zettair’s indexing performance improve (makes sense as it’s more designed for larger corpora); zettair’s search speed should probably be a bit faster because its search command line utility prints some unnecessary stats. For multi-searching in sphinx, I developed a Java client (with the hopes of making it competitive with Lucene – the one to beat) which connects to the sphinx searchd server via a socket (that’s their API model in the examples). sphinx returned searches the fastest – ~3x faster than Lucene. Its indexing time was also on par with zettair. Lucene obtained the highest relevance and smallest index size. The index time could probably be improved by fiddling with its merge parameters, but I wanted to avoid numerical adjustments in this evaluation. Xapian has very similar search performance to Lucene but with significant indexing costs (both time and space > 3x). sqlite has the worst relevance because it doesn’t sort by relevance nor seem to provide an ORDER BY function to do so.

Conclusion & Downloads

Based on these preliminary results and anecdotal information I’ve collected from the web and people in the field (with more emphasis on the latter), I would probably recommend Lucene (which is an IR library – use a wrapper platform like Solr w/ Nutch if you need all the search dressings like snippets, crawlers, servlets) for many vertical search indexing applications – especially if you need something that runs decently well out of the box (as that’s what I’m mainly evaluating here) and community support.

Keep in mind that these experiments are still very early (done on a weekend budget) and can/should be improved greatly with bigger and better data sets, tuned implementations, and community support (I’d be the first one to say these are far from perfect, so I open sourced my code below). It’s pretty hard to make a benchmark that everybody likes (especially in this space where there haven’t really been many … and I’m starting to see why ), not necessarily because there are always winners/losers and biases in benchmarks, but because there are so many different types of data sets and platform APIs and tuning parameters (at least databases support SQL!). This is just a start. I see this as a very evolutionary project that requires community support to get it right. Take the results here for what it’s worth and still run your own tuned benchmarks.

To encourage further search development and benchmarks, I’ve open sourced all the code here:

http://github.com/zooie/opensearch/tree/master

Happy to post any new and interesting results.