Understanding numeric/timestamp indexing in elasticseach - elasticsearch

Apologies if this is a noob question; I am just trying to make sure I understand the concept clearly
I am confused as to why the discussions on doing aggs in ES is often times paired with discussions of tips and tricks to improve latency (cache warming etc.), but range queries of the form gte and lte on a timestamp and/or numeric field is not.
I would have thought that internally, both cases would require a sequentical scan on the documents, so should have similar complexity. If anything, I would have assumed that ranges on numerics would be worse because they are not as suited for caching unless we do some form of rounding which is alluded to here.
Am I way off in my thinking?

Related

any possible ways to implement "reliable bloom filter"?

I know bloom filters can help with checking if some element is in a set while saving considerable storage space compared to keeping every element in a container, like std::set, to search for.
I also understand that bloom filters are probabilistic data structure, where the accuracy, or the possibility of generating false positives, will converge to a math expression. I was wondering whether it is possible to find some kind of data structure that is as efficient as bloom filters in terms of storage space requirement, probably with some inevitable compromise in time complexity of searching, but at the same time deliver 100% positive judgment, which excludes any chance of false positives.
I checked out cuckoo filters and xor filters and came to realize that it seems impossible to find the answer out of bloom filters because of their probability nature.
Is there any kind of data structure that satisfies my requirements? Or is this kind of data structure literally impossible to be implemented? Are there any more directions I can do further research in, and if so would you please name some keywords?
Sincere thanks for your patience!

Strategies to compare performance of two Elasticsearch queries?

Since actual query runtime varies, it's not always useful to just check the runtime of two queries to determine which is generally faster. What are some ways to generally test whether one query is more efficient than another?
As an example of what I'm after, in MongoDB I can run explain on a query to get the number of documents iterated vs. returned. If the documents iterated is several orders of magnitude higher than what it's actually returning, I know I have an inefficient query. I know that since Elasticsearch indexes data much differently than other dbs, this may not translate well, but I'm wondering if there's some rough equivalent.
I'm looking at the Profile API which looks like a good starting place. Are fields like next_doc and next_doc_count what I'm after? Are there any others I should look for? Thanks!!

Increasing relevancy of search results

I have a problem with making search output more practically usefull for the end users. The problem is rather related to the algorithm and approach then to exact technology or framework to use.
At the moment we have a database of products, that can be described with following schema:
From the search perspective we've done pretty standard things, 3-rd party text search with token analyzer, handling mistypes and synonyms (it is not the full list, but as I said, it is rather out of scope). But stil we need to perform extra work to make the search result closer to real life user needs, probably, in somewhat similar way how Google ranks indexed pages by relevancy. Ideas, that we`ve already considered as potentially applicable in solving the problem:
Analyze most popular search requests in widespread search engines (it is still a question how to get them) and increase rank for those entries in the index, which correspond (could be found with) to the popular requests;
Increase rank for newest (hot) entries;
Increase rank for the biggest group of entries, which correspond to the popular request and have something in common (that`s why it is a group);
Appreciate for any help or advising a direction, where to dig.
You may try pLSA; there are many references on the web, and there should be libraries and source code.
EDIT:
well, I took a closer look at Lucene recently, and it seems to give a much better answer to what the question actually asked (it does not use pLSA). As for the integration with db, you may use Hibernate Search (although it does not seem to be as powerful as using Lucene directy is).

Lucene - limit amount of results for specific term in search query

The problem is that one of our terms could be very common (for example number "3"). In that case I would like to limit the amount of search result Scored while Lucene is running the Query. Is that even possible?
Just to emphasize - I don't want just to limit Lucene search results (that could easily be done using second number parameter in IndexSearher.Search method). I want to tell Lucene something like - don't spent too much time searching hits for that specific term. In case you found, let's say, a 1,000,000 - stop looking and go to other terms.
No, you can't. As you might know, absolute scores are meaningless in Lucene, so there's no support for them.
Because the term is really common, the idf will be high (or low, depending on your perspective) so it will probably be relatively inconsequential due to Lucene's pruning algorithms. You can always change the boost to make it matter even less, but I'd double check that this is really your performance bottleneck.

Optimal Document Size for LSI Similarity Model

I'm using Gensim's excellent library to compute similarity queries on a corpus using LSI. However, I have a distinct feeling that the results could be better, and I'm trying to figure out whether I can adjust the corpus itself in order to improve the results.
I have a certain amount of control over how to split the documents. My original data has a lot of very short documents (mean length is 12 words in a document, but there exist documents that are 1-2 words long...), and there are a few logical ways to concatenate several documents into one. The problem is that I don't know whether it's worth doing this or not (and if so, to what extent). I can't find any material addressing this question, but only regarding the size of the corpus, and the size of the vocabulary. I assume this is because, at the end of the day, the size of a document is bounded by the size of the vocabulary. But I'm sure there are still some general guidelines that could help with this decision.
What is considered a document that is too short? What is too long? (I assume the latter is a function of |V|, but the former could easily be a constant value.)
Does anyone have experience with this? Can anyone point me in the direction of any papers/blog posts/research that address this question? Much appreciated!
Edited to add:
Regarding the strategy for grouping documents - each document is a text message sent between two parties. The potential grouping is based on this, where I can also take into consideration the time at which the messages were sent. Meaning, I could group all the messages sent between A and B within a certain hour, or on a certain day, or simply group all the messages between the two. I can also decide on a minimum or maximum number of messages grouped together, but that is exactly what my question is about - how do I know what the ideal length is?
Looking at number of words per document does not seem to me to be the correct approach. LSI/LSA is all about capturing the underlying semantics of the documents by detecting common co-occurrences.
You may want to read:
LSI: Probabilistic Analysis
Latent Semantic Analysis (particularly section 3.2)
A valid excerpt from 2:
An important feature of LSI is that it makes no assumptions
about a particular generative model behind the data. Whether
the distribution of terms in the corpus is “Gaussian”, Poisson, or
some other has no bearing on the effectiveness of this technique, at
least with respect to its mathematical underpinnings. Thus, it is
incorrect to say that use of LSI requires assuming that the attribute
values are normally distributed.
The thing I would be more concerned is if the short documents share similar co-occurring terms that will allow LSI to form an appropriate topic grouping all of those documents that for a human share the same subject. This can be hardly done automatically (maybe with a WordNet / ontology) by substituting rare terms with more frequent and general ones. But this is a very long shot requiring further research.
More specific answer on heuristic:
My best bet would be to treat conversations as your documents. So the grouping would be on the time proximity of the exchanged messages. Anything up to a few minutes (a quarter?) I would group together. There may be false positives though (strongly depending on the actual contents of your dataset). As with any hyper-parameter in NLP - your mileage will vary... so it is worth doing a few experiments.
Short documents are indeed a challenge when it comes to applying LDA, since the estimates for the word co-occurrence statistics are significantly worse for short documents (sparse data). One way to alleviate this issue is, as you mentioned, to somehow aggregate multiple short texts into one longer document by some heuristic measure.
One particularity nice test-case for this situation is topic modeling Twitter data, since it's limited by definition to 140 characters. In Empirical Study of Topic Modeling in Twitter (Hong et al, 2010), the authors argue that
Training a standard topic model on aggregated user messages leads to a
faster training process and better quality.
However, they also mention that different aggregation methods lead to different results:
Topics learned by using different aggregation strategies of
the data are substantially different from each other.
My recommendations:
If you are using your own heuristic for aggregating short messages into longer documents, make sure to experiment with different aggregation techniques (potentially all the "sensical" ones)
Consider using a "heuristic-free" LDA variant that is better tailored for short messages, e.g, Unsupervised Topic Modeling for Short Texts Using Distributed
Representations of Words

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