Carnegie Mellon University
15-826 Multimedia and Data Mining
Fall 2025 - C. Faloutsos

 Midterm Study Guide

1. Preliminaries - IMPORTANT

• No aids allowed, except
• a standard, 8'' x 11.5'' page with your notes - use both sides, and
• Pocket calculators: strongly recommended (logarithms)
• Photo id: please bring one
• Material to be examined:  all lecture foils, and all required papers / book-chapters listed below.
  

2. Additional info:

• Drill questions: are at https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~christos/courses/826-resources/REVIEW-QUESTIONS/ (may need CMU VPN access). Ignore questions that are out of scope (eg., hashing, etc)
• Older sample exam and solutions . Again, ignore questions that out of scope.
• Duration: 1h 20 minutes
• Place: in class, during class time, 2:00-3:20, on Fri 10/10 (as announced).
• Office hours by instructor (all on the usual zoom number):
  • 1:00-1:30pm Tu 10/7 (plus the usual one at 2-3pm)
  • 1:00-1:30pm Wed 10/8
  • 1:00-1:30pm Thu 10/9
• Also, check the discussions on canvas.

3. Notice:

4. Required text

• [MM Textbook] C. Faloutsos Searching Multimedia Databases by Content, Kluwer Academic Press, 1996. Evaluation draft (internal to CMU - pdf)

MATERIAL TO BE EXAMINED

1. Slides:

• From the course schedule, all the foils, up to and including  the lecture of '230_text3.pdf' (clustering). Notice that the file names for the foils are numbered in increasing order.
  
• • Excluded: hashing ('030_hashing.pdf').
  • Excluded also: the graph mining foils ('420-GraphMining_patterns.pdf', '435_GraphMining_anomalies.pdf', '436_GraphMining_types_of_fraud.pdf')

2. Multimedia Indexing

• Secondary key and spatial access methods
  • Jon Louis Bentley, Multidimensional binary search trees used for associative searching, Comm. of the ACM  (CACM), Volume 18 ,  Issue 9, pp. 509-517,  (September 1975)
  • A. Guttman R-Trees: a Dynamic Index Structure for Spatial Searching, Proc. ACM SIGMOD, June 1984, pp. 47-57, Boston, Mass.
  • J. Orenstein, Spatial Query Processing in an Object-Oriented Database System, Proc. ACM SIGMOD, May, 1986, pp. 326-336, Washington D.C.
  • MM-Textbook, chapters 4 and 5.
• Fractals
  
  • Christos Faloutsos and Ibrahim Kamel, Beyond Uniformity and Independence: Analysis of R-trees Using the Concept of Fractal Dimension, Proc. ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART PODS, May 1994, pp. 4-13, Minneapolis, MN. (and gzipped postscript)
  • Bernd-Uwe Pagel, Flip Korn and Christos Faloutsos, Deflating the Dimensionality Curse using Multiple Fractal Dimensions, ICDE 2000, San Diego, CA, Feb. 2000.
  • Power laws, lognormals etc: M. E. J. Newman, Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf's law Contemporary Physics 46, 323-351 (2005) (local pdf copy)
• Text
• MM-textbook, chapter 6
  

Last modified: Oct. 2, 2025, by Christos Faloutsos