English

Challenges of Heterogeneity in Big Data: A Comparative Study of Classification in Large-Scale Structured and Unstructured Domains

Machine Learning 2025-12-02 v1 Computation and Language Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing

Abstract

This study analyzes the impact of heterogeneity ("Variety") in Big Data by comparing classification strategies across structured (Epsilon) and unstructured (Rest-Mex, IMDB) domains. A dual methodology was implemented: evolutionary and Bayesian hyperparameter optimization (Genetic Algorithms, Optuna) in Python for numerical data, and distributed processing in Apache Spark for massive textual corpora. The results reveal a "complexity paradox": in high-dimensional spaces, optimized linear models (SVM, Logistic Regression) outperformed deep architectures and Gradient Boosting. Conversely, in text-based domains, the constraints of distributed fine-tuning led to overfitting in complex models, whereas robust feature engineering -- specifically Transformer-based embeddings (ROBERTa) and Bayesian Target Encoding -- enabled simpler models to generalize effectively. This work provides a unified framework for algorithm selection based on data nature and infrastructure constraints.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.00298,
  title  = {Challenges of Heterogeneity in Big Data: A Comparative Study of Classification in Large-Scale Structured and Unstructured Domains},
  author = {González Trigueros Jesús Eduardo and Alonso Sánchez Alejandro and Muñoz Rivera Emilio and Peñarán Prieto Mariana Jaqueline and Mendoza González Camila Natalia},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.00298},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

13 pages, 1 figure, 3 tables. Comparative study involving Apache Spark and Hyperparameter Optimization. Keywords: Big Data, NLP, Tabular Data