Abstract
•An overview of the technologies for Big Data analytics is presented.•A taxonomy for the design of information and process fusion in Big Data is introduced.•The scalability of the alternative approaches of such fusion of information/models is analyzed.•Several guidelines are given for future study on the topic.
We live in a world were data are generated from a myriad of sources, and it is really cheap to collect and storage such data. However, the real benefit is not related to the data itself, but with the algorithms that are capable of processing such data in a tolerable elapse time, and to extract valuable knowledge from it. Therefore, the use of Big Data Analytics tools provide very significant advantages to both industry and academia. The MapReduce programming framework can be stressed as the main paradigm related with such tools. It is mainly identified by carrying out a distributed execution for the sake of providing a high degree of scalability, together with a fault-tolerant scheme.
In every MapReduce algorithm, first local models are learned with a subset of the original data within the so-called Map tasks. Then, the Reduce task is devoted to fuse the partial outputs generated by each Map. The ways of designing such fusion of information/models may have a strong impact in the quality of the final system. In this work, we will enumerate and analyze two alternative methodologies that may be found both in the specialized literature and in standard Machine Learning libraries for Big Data. Our main objective is to provide an introduction of the characteristics of these methodologies, as well as giving some guidelines for the design of novel algorithms in this field of research. Finally, a short experimental study will allow us to contrast the scalability issues for each type of process fusion in MapReduce for Big Data Analytics.