ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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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- Genre: Doctoral Dissertation
emotion dimensions like arousal and valence are gaining popularity within the research
community due to an increase in the availability of datasets annotated with these
emotions. Unlike the discrete emotions, continuous emotions allow modeling of subtle
and complex affect dimensions but are difficult to predict.
Dimension reduction techniques form the core of emotion recognition systems and
help create a new feature space that is more helpful in predicting emotions. But these
techniques do not necessarily guarantee a better predictive capability as most of them
are unsupervised, especially in regression learning. In emotion recognition literature,
supervised dimension reduction techniques have not been explored much and in this
work a solution is provided through probabilistic topic models. Topic models provide
a strong probabilistic framework to embed new learning paradigms and modalities.
In this thesis, the graphical structure of Latent Dirichlet Allocation has been explored
and new models tuned to emotion recognition and change detection have been built.
In this work, it has been shown that the double mixture structure of topic models
helps 1) to visualize feature patterns, and 2) to project features onto a topic simplex
that is more predictive of human emotions, when compared to popular techniques
like PCA and KernelPCA. Traditionally, topic models have been used on quantized
features but in this work, a continuous topic model called the Dirichlet Gaussian
Mixture model has been proposed. Evaluation of DGMM has shown that while modeling
videos, performance of LDA models can be replicated even without quantizing
the features. Until now, topic models have not been explored in a supervised context
of video analysis and thus a Regularized supervised topic model (RSLDA) that
models video and audio features is introduced. RSLDA learning algorithm performs
both dimension reduction and regularized linear regression simultaneously, and has outperformed supervised dimension reduction techniques like SPCA and Correlation
based feature selection algorithms. In a first of its kind, two new topic models, Adaptive
temporal topic model (ATTM) and SLDA for change detection (SLDACD) have
been developed for predicting concept drift in time series data. These models do not
assume independence of consecutive frames and outperform traditional topic models
in detecting local and global changes respectively.
in the configuration may have been thoroughly tested, faults still arise due to interactions among the components composed, making the configuration faulty. When there are k components, combinatorial testing algorithms can be used to identify faulty interactions for t or fewer components, for some threshold 2 <= t <= k on the size of interactions considered. In general these methods do not identify specific faults, but rather indicate the presence or absence of some fault. To identify specific faults, an adaptive testing regime repeatedly constructs and tests configurations in order to determine, for each interaction of interest, whether it is faulty or not. In order to perform such testing in a loosely coupled distributed environment such as
the cloud, it is imperative that testing results can be combined from many different servers. The TA defines rules to permit results to be combined, and to identify the faulty interactions. Using the TA, configurations can be tested concurrently on different servers and in any order. The results, using the TA, remain the same.
Efficient processing of skyline queries on static data sources, data streams and incomplete datasets
An assumption commonly made by many skyline algorithms is that a skyline query is applied to a single static data source or data stream. Unfortunately, this assumption does not hold in many applications in which a skyline query may involve attributes belonging to multiple data sources and requires a join operation to be performed before the skyline can be produced. Recently, various skyline-join algorithms have been proposed to address this problem in the context of static data sources. However, these algorithms suffer from several drawbacks: they often need to scan the data sources exhaustively to obtain the skyline-join results; moreover, the pruning techniques employed to eliminate tuples are largely based on expensive tuple-to-tuple comparisons. On the other hand, most data stream techniques focus on single stream skyline queries, thus rendering them unsuitable for skyline-join queries.
Another assumption typically made by most of the earlier skyline algorithms is that the data is complete and all skyline attribute values are available. Due to this constraint, these algorithms cannot be applied to incomplete data sources in which some of the attribute values are missing and are represented by NULL values. There exists a definition of dominance for incomplete data, but this leads to undesirable consequences such as non-transitive and cyclic dominance relations both of which are detrimental to skyline processing.
Based on the aforementioned observations, the main goal of the research described in this dissertation is the design and development of a framework of skyline operators that effectively handles three distinct types of skyline queries: 1) skyline-join queries on static data sources, 2) skyline-window-join queries over data streams, and 3) strata-skyline queries on incomplete datasets. This dissertation presents the unique challenges posed by these skyline queries and addresses the shortcomings of current skyline techniques by proposing efficient methods to tackle the added overhead in processing skyline queries on static data sources, data streams, and incomplete datasets.
Despite the importance of personal information, in many cases people do not reveal this information to the public. Predicting the hidden or missing information is a common response to this challenge. In this thesis, we address the problem of predicting user attributes and future or missing links using an egocentric approach. The current research proposes novel concepts and approaches to better understand social media users in twofold including, a) their attributes, preferences, and interests, and b) their future or missing connections and interactions. More specifically, the contributions of this dissertation are (1) proposing a framework to study social media users through their attributes and link information, (2) proposing a scalable algorithm to predict user preferences; and (3) proposing a novel approach to predict attributes and links with limited information. The proposed algorithms use an egocentric approach to improve the state of the art algorithms in two directions. First by improving the prediction accuracy, and second, by increasing the scalability of the algorithms.