Cost-Effective Big Data Mining in the Cloud: A Case Study with K-means

Mining big data often requires tremendous computational resources. This has become a major obstacle to broad applications of big data analytics. Cloud computing allows data scientists to access computational resources on-demand for building their big data analytics solutions in the cloud. However, the monetary cost of mining big data in the cloud can still be unexpectedly high. For example, running 100 m4-xlarge Amazon EC2 instances for a month costs approximately 17,495.00. On this ground, it is a critical issue to analyze the cost effectiveness of big data mining in the cloud, i.e., how to achieve a sufficiently satisfactory result at the lowest possible computation cost. In certain big data mining scenarios, 100% accuracy is unnecessary. Instead, it is often more preferable to achieve a sufficient accuracy, e.g., 99%, at a much lower cost, e.g., 10%, than the cost of achieving the 100% accuracy. In this paper, we explore and demonstrate the cost effectiveness of big data mining with a case study using well known k-means. With the case study, we find that achieving 99% accuracy only needs 0.32%-46.17% computation cost of 100% accuracy. This finding lays the cornerstone for cost-effective big data mining in a variety of domains.