This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.

In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.

Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.

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Description
In recent years, the rise in social media usage both vertically in terms of the number of users by platform and horizontally in terms of the number of platforms per user has led to data explosion.

User-generated social media content provides an excellent opportunity to mine data of interest and to

In recent years, the rise in social media usage both vertically in terms of the number of users by platform and horizontally in terms of the number of platforms per user has led to data explosion.

User-generated social media content provides an excellent opportunity to mine data of interest and to build resourceful applications. The rise in the number of healthcare-related social media platforms and the volume of healthcare knowledge available online in the last decade has resulted in increased social media usage for personal healthcare. In the United States, nearly ninety percent of adults, in the age group 50-75, have used social media to seek and share health information. Motivated by the growth of social media usage, this thesis focuses on healthcare-related applications, study various challenges posed by social media data, and address them through novel and effective machine learning algorithms.



The major challenges for effectively and efficiently mining social media data to build functional applications include: (1) Data reliability and acceptance: most social media data (especially in the context of healthcare-related social media) is not regulated and little has been studied on the benefits of healthcare-specific social media; (2) Data heterogeneity: social media data is generated by users with both demographic and geographic diversity; (3) Model transparency and trustworthiness: most existing machine learning models for addressing heterogeneity are considered as black box models, not many providing explanations for why they do what they do to trust them.

In response to these challenges, three main research directions have been investigated in this thesis: (1) Analyzing social media influence on healthcare: to study the real world impact of social media as a source to offer or seek support for patients with chronic health conditions; (2) Learning from task heterogeneity: to propose various models and algorithms that are adaptable to new social media platforms and robust to dynamic social media data, specifically on modeling user behaviors, identifying similar actors across platforms, and adapting black box models to a specific learning scenario; (3) Explaining heterogeneous models: to interpret predictive models in the presence of task heterogeneity. In this thesis, novel algorithms with theoretical analysis from various aspects (e.g., time complexity, convergence properties) have been proposed. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithms is demonstrated by comparison with state-of-the-art methods and relevant case studies.
ContributorsNelakurthi, Arun Reddy (Author) / He, Jingrui (Thesis advisor) / Cook, Curtiss B (Committee member) / Maciejewski, Ross (Committee member) / Tong, Hanghang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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Description
Machine learning (ML) and deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved great success in a variety of application domains, however, despite significant effort to make these networks robust, they remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks in which input that is perceptually indistinguishable from natural data can be erroneously classified with high prediction

Machine learning (ML) and deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved great success in a variety of application domains, however, despite significant effort to make these networks robust, they remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks in which input that is perceptually indistinguishable from natural data can be erroneously classified with high prediction confidence. Works on defending against adversarial examples can be broadly classified as correcting or detecting, which aim, respectively at negating the effects of the attack and correctly classifying the input, or detecting and rejecting the input as adversarial. In this work, a new approach for detecting adversarial examples is proposed. The approach takes advantage of the robustness of natural images to noise. As noise is added to a natural image, the prediction probability of its true class drops, but the drop is not sudden or precipitous. The same seems to not hold for adversarial examples. In other word, the stress response profile for natural images seems different from that of adversarial examples, which could be detected by their stress response profile. An evaluation of this approach for detecting adversarial examples is performed on the MNIST, CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets. Experimental data shows that this approach is effective at detecting some adversarial examples on small scaled simple content images and with little sacrifice on benign accuracy.
ContributorsSun, Lin (Author) / Bazzi, Rida (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Tong, Hanghang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019