Continuous Monitoring of Pareto Frontiers on Partially Ordered Attributes for Many Users

We study the problem of continuous object dissemination—given a large number of users and continuously arriving new objects, deliver an object to all users who prefer the object. Many real world applications analyze users’ preferences for effective object dissemination. For continuously arriving objects, timely finding users who prefer a new object is challenging. In this paper, we consider an append-only table of objects with multiple attributes and users’ preferences on individual attributes are modeled as strict partial orders. An object is preferred by a user if it belongs to the Pareto frontier with respect to the user’s partial orders. Users’ preferences can be similar. Exploiting shared computation across similar preferences of different users, we design algorithms to find target users of a new object. In order to find users of similar preferences, we study the novel problem of clustering users’ preferences that are represented as partial orders. We also present an approximate solution of the problem of finding target users which is more efficient than the exact one while ensuring sufficient accuracy. Furthermore, we extend the algorithms to operate under the semantics of sliding window. We present the results from comprehensive experiments for evaluating the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed techniques.