We have conducted an analysis of data from 502,891 Twitter users and focused on investigating the potential correlation between hashtags and the increase of followers to determine whether the addition of hashtags to tweets produces new followers. We have designed an experiment with two groups of users: one tweeting with random hashtags and one tweeting without hashtags. The results showed that there is a correlation between hashtags and followers: on average, users tweeting with hashtags increased their followers by 2.88, while users tweeting without hashtags increased 0.88 followers. We present a simple, reproducible approach to extract and analyze Twitter user data for this and similar purposes.

Data mining algorithms are usually designed to optimize a trade-off between predictive accuracy and computational efficiency. This paper introduces energy consumption and energy efficiency as important factors to consider during data mining algorithm analysis and evaluation. We conducted an experiment to illustrate how energy consumption and accuracy are affected when varying the parameters of the Very Fast Decision Tree (VFDT) algorithm. These results are compared with a theoretical analysis on the algorithm, indicating that energy consumption is affected by the parameters design and that it can be reduced significantly while maintaining accuracy.

Large-scale data centers account for a significant share of the energy consumption in many countries. Machine learning technology requires intensive workloads and thus drives requirements for lots of power and cooling capacity in data centers. It is time to explore green machine learning. The aim of this paper is to profile a machine learning algorithm with respect to its energy consumption and to determine the causes behind this consumption. The first scalable machine learning algorithm able to handle large volumes of streaming data is the Very Fast Decision Tree (VFDT), which outputs competitive results in comparison to algorithms that analyze data from static datasets. Our objectives are to: (i) establish a methodology that profiles the energy consumption of decision trees at the function level, (ii) apply this methodology in an experiment to obtain the energy consumption of the VFDT, (iii) conduct a fine-grained analysis of the functions that consume most of the energy, providing an understanding of that consumption, (iv) analyze how different parameter settings can significantly reduce the energy consumption. The results show that by addressing the most energy intensive part of the VFDT, the energy consumption can be reduced up to a 74.3%.

Machine learning software accounts for a significant amount of energy consumed in data centers. These algorithms are usually optimized towards predictive performance, i.e. accuracy, and scalability. This is the case of data stream mining algorithms. Although these algorithms are adaptive to the incoming data, they have fixed parameters from the beginning of the execution. We have observed that having fixed parameters lead to unnecessary computations, thus making the algorithm energy inefficient.In this paper we present the nmin adaptation method for Hoeffding trees. This method adapts the value of the nmin pa- rameter, which significantly affects the energy consumption of the algorithm. The method reduces unnecessary computations and memory accesses, thus reducing the energy, while the accuracy is only marginally affected. We experimentally compared VFDT (Very Fast Decision Tree, the first Hoeffding tree algorithm) and CVFDT (Concept-adapting VFDT) with the VFDT-nmin (VFDT with nmin adaptation). The results show that VFDT-nmin consumes up to 27% less energy than the standard VFDT, and up to 92% less energy than CVFDT, trading off a few percent of accuracy in a few datasets.