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
The increasing popularity of Twitter renders improved trustworthiness and relevance assessment of tweets much more important for search. However, given the limitations on the size of tweets, it is hard to extract measures for ranking from the tweet's content alone. I propose a method of ranking tweets by generating a

The increasing popularity of Twitter renders improved trustworthiness and relevance assessment of tweets much more important for search. However, given the limitations on the size of tweets, it is hard to extract measures for ranking from the tweet's content alone. I propose a method of ranking tweets by generating a reputation score for each tweet that is based not just on content, but also additional information from the Twitter ecosystem that consists of users, tweets, and the web pages that tweets link to. This information is obtained by modeling the Twitter ecosystem as a three-layer graph. The reputation score is used to power two novel methods of ranking tweets by propagating the reputation over an agreement graph based on tweets' content similarity. Additionally, I show how the agreement graph helps counter tweet spam. An evaluation of my method on 16~million tweets from the TREC 2011 Microblog Dataset shows that it doubles the precision over baseline Twitter Search and achieves higher precision than current state of the art method. I present a detailed internal empirical evaluation of RAProp in comparison to several alternative approaches proposed by me, as well as external evaluation in comparison to the current state of the art method.
ContributorsRavikumar, Srijith (Author) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Description
Multidimensional data have various representations. Thanks to their simplicity in modeling multidimensional data and the availability of various mathematical tools (such as tensor decompositions) that support multi-aspect analysis of such data, tensors are increasingly being used in many application domains including scientific data management, sensor data management, and social network

Multidimensional data have various representations. Thanks to their simplicity in modeling multidimensional data and the availability of various mathematical tools (such as tensor decompositions) that support multi-aspect analysis of such data, tensors are increasingly being used in many application domains including scientific data management, sensor data management, and social network data analysis. Relational model, on the other hand, enables semantic manipulation of data using relational operators, such as projection, selection, Cartesian-product, and set operators. For many multidimensional data applications, tensor operations as well as relational operations need to be supported throughout the data life cycle. In this thesis, we introduce a tensor-based relational data model (TRM), which enables both tensor- based data analysis and relational manipulations of multidimensional data, and define tensor-relational operations on this model. Then we introduce a tensor-relational data management system, so called, TensorDB. TensorDB is based on TRM, which brings together relational algebraic operations (for data manipulation and integration) and tensor algebraic operations (for data analysis). We develop optimization strategies for tensor-relational operations in both in-memory and in-database TensorDB. The goal of the TRM and TensorDB is to serve as a single environment that supports the entire life cycle of data; that is, data can be manipulated, integrated, processed, and analyzed.
ContributorsKim, Mijung (Author) / Candan, K. Selcuk (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Sundaram, Hari (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Twitter is a micro-blogging platform where the users can be social, informational or both. In certain cases, users generate tweets that have no "hashtags" or "@mentions"; we call it an orphaned tweet. The user will be more interested to find more "context" of an orphaned tweet presumably to engage with

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform where the users can be social, informational or both. In certain cases, users generate tweets that have no "hashtags" or "@mentions"; we call it an orphaned tweet. The user will be more interested to find more "context" of an orphaned tweet presumably to engage with his/her friend on that topic. Finding context for an Orphaned tweet manually is challenging because of larger social graph of a user , the enormous volume of tweets generated per second, topic diversity, and limited information from tweet length of 140 characters. To help the user to get the context of an orphaned tweet, this thesis aims at building a hashtag recommendation system called TweetSense, to suggest hashtags as a context or metadata for the orphaned tweets. This in turn would increase user's social engagement and impact Twitter to maintain its monthly active online users in its social network. In contrast to other existing systems, this hashtag recommendation system recommends personalized hashtags by exploiting the social signals of users in Twitter. The novelty with this system is that it emphasizes on selecting the suitable candidate set of hashtags from the related tweets of user's social graph (timeline).The system then rank them based on the combination of features scores computed from their tweet and user related features. It is evaluated based on its ability to predict suitable hashtags for a random sample of tweets whose existing hashtags are deliberately removed for evaluation. I present a detailed internal empirical evaluation of TweetSense, as well as an external evaluation in comparison with current state of the art method.
ContributorsVijayakumar, Manikandan (Author) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Thesis advisor) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
Micro-blogging platforms like Twitter have become some of the most popular sites for people to share and express their views and opinions about public events like debates, sports events or other news articles. These social updates by people complement the written news articles or transcripts of events in giving the

Micro-blogging platforms like Twitter have become some of the most popular sites for people to share and express their views and opinions about public events like debates, sports events or other news articles. These social updates by people complement the written news articles or transcripts of events in giving the popular public opinion about these events. So it would be useful to annotate the transcript with tweets. The technical challenge is to align the tweets with the correct segment of the transcript. ET-LDA by Hu et al [9] addresses this issue by modeling the whole process with an LDA-based graphical model. The system segments the transcript into coherent and meaningful parts and also determines if a tweet is a general tweet about the event or it refers to a particular segment of the transcript. One characteristic of the Hu et al’s model is that it expects all the data to be available upfront and uses batch inference procedure. But in many cases we find that data is not available beforehand, and it is often streaming. In such cases it is infeasible to repeatedly run the batch inference algorithm. My thesis presents an online inference algorithm for the ET-LDA model, with a continuous stream of tweet data and compare their runtime and performance to existing algorithms.
ContributorsAcharya, Anirudh (Author) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Tong, Hanghang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
Browsing Twitter users, or browsers, often find it increasingly cumbersome to attach meaning to tweets that are displayed on their timeline as they follow more and more users or pages. The tweets being browsed are created by Twitter users called originators, and are of some significance to the browser who

Browsing Twitter users, or browsers, often find it increasingly cumbersome to attach meaning to tweets that are displayed on their timeline as they follow more and more users or pages. The tweets being browsed are created by Twitter users called originators, and are of some significance to the browser who has chosen to subscribe to the tweets from the originator by following the originator. Although, hashtags are used to tag tweets in an effort to attach context to the tweets, many tweets do not have a hashtag. Such tweets are called orphan tweets and they adversely affect the experience of a browser.

A hashtag is a type of label or meta-data tag used in social networks and micro-blogging services which makes it easier for users to find messages with a specific theme or content. The context of a tweet can be defined as a set of one or more hashtags. Users often do not use hashtags to tag their tweets. This leads to the problem of missing context for tweets. To address the problem of missing hashtags, a statistical method was proposed which predicts most likely hashtags based on the social circle of an originator.

In this thesis, we propose to improve on the existing context recovery system by selectively limiting the candidate set of hashtags to be derived from the intimate circle of the originator rather than from every user in the social network of the originator. This helps in reducing the computation, increasing speed of prediction, scaling the system to originators with large social networks while still preserving most of the accuracy of the predictions. We also propose to not only derive the candidate hashtags from the social network of the originator but also derive the candidate hashtags based on the content of the tweet. We further propose to learn personalized statistical models according to the adoption patterns of different originators. This helps in not only identifying the personalized candidate set of hashtags based on the social circle and content of the tweets but also in customizing the hashtag adoption pattern to the originator of the tweet.
ContributorsMallapura Umamaheshwar, Tejas (Author) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Thesis advisor) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
Stock market news and investing tips are popular topics in Twitter. In this dissertation, first I utilize a 5-year financial news corpus comprising over 50,000 articles collected from the NASDAQ website matching the 30 stock symbols in Dow Jones Index (DJI) to train a directional stock price prediction system based

Stock market news and investing tips are popular topics in Twitter. In this dissertation, first I utilize a 5-year financial news corpus comprising over 50,000 articles collected from the NASDAQ website matching the 30 stock symbols in Dow Jones Index (DJI) to train a directional stock price prediction system based on news content. Next, I proceed to show that information in articles indicated by breaking Tweet volumes leads to a statistically significant boost in the hourly directional prediction accuracies for the DJI stock prices mentioned in these articles. Secondly, I show that using document-level sentiment extraction does not yield a statistically significant boost in the directional predictive accuracies in the presence of other 1-gram keyword features. Thirdly I test the performance of the system on several time-frames and identify the 4 hour time-frame for both the price charts and for Tweet breakout detection as the best time-frame combination. Finally, I develop a set of price momentum based trade exit rules to cut losing trades early and to allow the winning trades run longer. I show that the Tweet volume breakout based trading system with the price momentum based exit rules not only improves the winning accuracy and the return on investment, but it also lowers the maximum drawdown and achieves the highest overall return over maximum drawdown.
ContributorsAlostad, Hana (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Corman, Steven (Committee member) / Tong, Hanghang (Committee member) / He, Jingrui (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
In supervised learning, machine learning techniques can be applied to learn a model on

a small set of labeled documents which can be used to classify a larger set of unknown

documents. Machine learning techniques can be used to analyze a political scenario

in a given society. A lot of research has been

In supervised learning, machine learning techniques can be applied to learn a model on

a small set of labeled documents which can be used to classify a larger set of unknown

documents. Machine learning techniques can be used to analyze a political scenario

in a given society. A lot of research has been going on in this field to understand

the interactions of various people in the society in response to actions taken by their

organizations.

This paper talks about understanding the Russian influence on people in Latvia.

This is done by building an eeffective model learnt on initial set of documents

containing a combination of official party web-pages, important political leaders' social

networking sites. Since twitter is a micro-blogging site which allows people to post

their opinions on any topic, the model built is used for estimating the tweets sup-

porting the Russian and Latvian political organizations in Latvia. All the documents

collected for analysis are in Latvian and Russian languages which are rich in vocabulary resulting into huge number of features. Hence, feature selection techniques can

be used to reduce the vocabulary set relevant to the classification model. This thesis

provides a comparative analysis of traditional feature selection techniques and implementation of a new iterative feature selection method using EM and cross-domain

training along with supportive visualization tool. This method out performed other

feature selection methods by reducing the number of features up-to 50% along with

good model accuracy. The results from the classification are used to interpret user

behavior and their political influence patterns across organizations in Latvia using

interactive dashboard with combination of powerful widgets.
ContributorsBollapragada, Lakshmi Gayatri Niharika (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Sen, Arunabha (Committee member) / Hsiao, Ihan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
Tensors are commonly used for representing multi-dimensional data, such as Web graphs, sensor streams, and social networks. As a consequence of the increase in the use of tensors, tensor decomposition operations began to form the basis for many data analysis and knowledge discovery tasks, from clustering, trend detection, anomaly detection

Tensors are commonly used for representing multi-dimensional data, such as Web graphs, sensor streams, and social networks. As a consequence of the increase in the use of tensors, tensor decomposition operations began to form the basis for many data analysis and knowledge discovery tasks, from clustering, trend detection, anomaly detection to correlationanalysis [31, 38]. It is well known that Singular Value matrix Decomposition (SVD) [9] is used to extract latent semantics for matrix data. When apply SVD to tensors, which have more than two modes, it is tensor decomposition. The two most popular tensor decomposition algorithms are the Tucker [54] and the CP [19] decompositions. Intuitively, they both generalize SVD to tensors. However, one key problem with tensor decomposition is its computational complexity which may cause system bottleneck. Therefore, two phase block-centric CP tensor decomposition (2PCP) was proposed to partition the tensor into small sub-tensors, execute sub-tensor decomposition in parallel and combine the factors from each sub-tensor into final decomposition factors through iterative rerefinement process. Consequently, I proposed Sub-tensor Impact Graph (SIG) to account for inaccuracy propagation among sub-tensors and measure the impact of decomposition of sub-tensors on the other's decomposition, Based on SIG, I proposed several optimization strategies to optimize 2PCP's phase-2 refinement process. Furthermore, I applied SIG and optimization strategies for data focus, data evolution, and focus shifting in tensor analysis. Personalized Tensor Decomposition (PTD) is proposed to account for the users focus given the observations that in many applications, the user may have a focus of interest i.e., part of the data for which the user needs high accuracy and beyond this area focus, accuracy may not be as critical. PTD takes as input one or more areas of focus and performs the decomposition in such a way that, when reconstructed, the accuracy of the tensor is boosted for these areas of focus. A related challenge of data evolution in tensor analytics is incremental tensor decomposition since re-computation of the whole tensor decomposition with each update will cause high computational costs and incur large memory overheads. Especially for applications where data evolves over time and the tensor-based analysis results need to be continuouslymaintained. To avoid re-decomposition, I propose a two-phase block-incremental CP-based tensor decomposition technique, BICP, that efficiently and effectively maintains tensor decomposition results in the presence of dynamically evolving tensor data. I further extend the research focus on user focus shift. User focus may change over time as data is evolving along the time. Although PTD is efficient, re-computation for each user preference update can be the bottleneck for the system. Therefore I propose dynamic evolving user focus tensor decomposition which can smartly reuse the existing decomposition result to improve the efficiency of evolving user focus block decomposition.
ContributorsHuang, shengyu (Author) / Candan, K. Selcuk (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Sapino, Maria Luisa (Committee member) / Tong, Hanghang (Committee member) / Zou, Jia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
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Description
Many real-world problems, such as model- and data-driven computer simulation analysis, social and collaborative network analysis, brain data analysis, and so on, benefit from jointly modeling and analyzing the underlying patterns associated with complex, multi-relational data. Tensor decomposition is an ideal mathematical tool for this joint modeling, due to its

Many real-world problems, such as model- and data-driven computer simulation analysis, social and collaborative network analysis, brain data analysis, and so on, benefit from jointly modeling and analyzing the underlying patterns associated with complex, multi-relational data. Tensor decomposition is an ideal mathematical tool for this joint modeling, due to its simultaneous analysis of such multi-relational data, which is made possible by the data's multidimensional, array-based nature. A major challenge in tensor decomposition lies with its computational and space complexity, especially for dense datasets. While the process is comparatively faster for sparse tensors, decomposition is still a major bottleneck for many applications. The tensor decomposition process results in dense (hence, large) intermediate results, even when the input tensor is sparse (or small). Noise is another challenge for most data mining techniques, and many tensor decomposition schemes are sensitive to noisy datasets; this is an inevitable problem for real-world data, which can lead to false conclusions. In this dissertation, I develop innovative tensor decomposition algorithms for mining both sparse and dense multi-relational data in a noise-resistant way. I present novel, scalable, parallelizable tensor decomposition algorithms, specifically tuned to be effective for dense, noisy tensors, and which maintain the quality of the resulting analysis. Furthermore, I present results on multi-relational data applications focusing on model- and data-driven computer simulation analysis, as well as social network and web mining, which demonstrate the effectiveness of these tensor decompositions.
ContributorsLi, Xinsheng (Author) / Candan, Kasim S (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Sapino, Maria L (Committee member) / Tong, Hanghang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019