Benchmarking Classification Algorithms on High-Performance Computing Clusters

Comparing and benchmarking classification algorithms is an important topic in applied data analysis. Extensive and thorough studies of such a kind will produce a considerable computational burden and are therefore best delegated to high-performance computing clusters. We build upon our recently developed R packages BatchJobs (Map, Reduce and Filter operations from functional programming for clusters) and BatchExperiments (Parallelization and management of statistical experiments). Using these two packages, such experiments can now effectively and reproducibly be performed with minimal effort for the researcher. We present benchmarking results for standard classification algorithms and study the influence of pre-processing steps on their performance.