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This thesis proposed a novel approach to establish the trust model in a social network scenario based on users' emails. Email is one of the most important social connections nowadays. By analyzing email exchange activities among users, a social network trust model can be established to judge the trust rate

This thesis proposed a novel approach to establish the trust model in a social network scenario based on users' emails. Email is one of the most important social connections nowadays. By analyzing email exchange activities among users, a social network trust model can be established to judge the trust rate between each two users. The whole trust checking process is divided into two steps: local checking and remote checking. Local checking directly contacts the email server to calculate the trust rate based on user's own email communication history. Remote checking is a distributed computing process to get help from user's social network friends and built the trust rate together. The email-based trust model is built upon a cloud computing framework called MobiCloud. Inside MobiCloud, each user occupies a virtual machine which can directly communicate with others. Based on this feature, the distributed trust model is implemented as a combination of local analysis and remote analysis in the cloud. Experiment results show that the trust evaluation model can give accurate trust rate even in a small scale social network which does not have lots of social connections. With this trust model, the security in both social network services and email communication could be improved.
ContributorsZhong, Yunji (Author) / Huang, Dijiang (Thesis advisor) / Dasgupta, Partha (Committee member) / Syrotiuk, Violet (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
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Description
Diffusion processes in networks can be used to model many real-world processes, such as the propagation of a rumor on social networks and cascading failures on power networks. Analysis of diffusion processes in networks can help us answer important questions such as the role and the importance of each node

Diffusion processes in networks can be used to model many real-world processes, such as the propagation of a rumor on social networks and cascading failures on power networks. Analysis of diffusion processes in networks can help us answer important questions such as the role and the importance of each node in the network for spreading the diffusion and how to top or contain a cascading failure in the network. This dissertation consists of three parts.

In the first part, we study the problem of locating multiple diffusion sources in networks under the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model. Given a complete snapshot of the network, we developed a sample-path-based algorithm, named clustering and localization, and proved that for regular trees, the estimators produced by the proposed algorithm are within a constant distance from the real sources with a high probability. Then, we considered the case in which only a partial snapshot is observed and proposed a new algorithm, named Optimal-Jordan-Cover (OJC). The algorithm first extracts a subgraph using a candidate selection algorithm that selects source candidates based on the number of observed infected nodes in their neighborhoods. Then, in the extracted subgraph, OJC finds a set of nodes that "cover" all observed infected nodes with the minimum radius. The set of nodes is called the Jordan cover, and is regarded as the set of diffusion sources. We proved that OJC can locate all sources with probability one asymptotically with partial observations in the Erdos-Renyi (ER) random graph. Multiple experiments on different networks were done, which show our algorithms outperform others.

In the second part, we tackle the problem of reconstructing the diffusion history from partial observations. We formulated the diffusion history reconstruction problem as a maximum a posteriori (MAP) problem and proved the problem is NP hard. Then we proposed a step-by- step reconstruction algorithm, which can always produce a diffusion history that is consistent with the partial observations. Our experimental results based on synthetic and real networks show that the algorithm significantly outperforms some existing methods.

In the third part, we consider the problem of improving the robustness of an interdependent network by rewiring a small number of links during a cascading attack. We formulated the problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) problem. While the problem is NP-hard, we developed an effective and efficient algorithm, RealWire, to robustify the network and to mitigate the damage during the attack. Extensive experimental results show that our algorithm outperforms other algorithms on most of the robustness metrics.
ContributorsChen, Zhen (Author) / Ying, Lei (Thesis advisor) / Tong, Hanghang (Thesis advisor) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / He, Jingrui (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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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
Measuring node centrality is a critical common denominator behind many important graph mining tasks. While the existing literature offers a wealth of different node centrality measures, it remains a daunting task on how to intervene the node centrality in a desired way. In this thesis, we study the problem of

Measuring node centrality is a critical common denominator behind many important graph mining tasks. While the existing literature offers a wealth of different node centrality measures, it remains a daunting task on how to intervene the node centrality in a desired way. In this thesis, we study the problem of minimizing the centrality of one or more target nodes by edge operation. The heart of the proposed method is an accurate and efficient algorithm to estimate the impact of edge deletion on the spectrum of the underlying network, based on the observation that the edge deletion is essentially a local, sparse perturbation to the original network. Extensive experiments are conducted on a diverse set of real networks to demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency and scalability of our approach. In particular, it is average of 260.95%, in terms of minimizing eigen-centrality, better than the standard matrix-perturbation based algorithm, with lower time complexity.
ContributorsPeng, Ruiyue (Author) / Tong, Hanghang (Thesis advisor) / He, Jingrui (Committee member) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
Predictive analytics embraces an extensive area of techniques from statistical modeling to machine learning to data mining and is applied in business intelligence, public health, disaster management and response, and many other fields. To date, visualization has been broadly used to support tasks in the predictive analytics pipeline under the

Predictive analytics embraces an extensive area of techniques from statistical modeling to machine learning to data mining and is applied in business intelligence, public health, disaster management and response, and many other fields. To date, visualization has been broadly used to support tasks in the predictive analytics pipeline under the underlying assumption that a human-in-the-loop can aid the analysis by integrating domain knowledge that might not be broadly captured by the system. Primary uses of visualization in the predictive analytics pipeline have focused on data cleaning, exploratory analysis, and diagnostics. More recently, numerous visual analytics systems for feature selection, incremental learning, and various prediction tasks have been proposed to support the growing use of complex models, agent-specific optimization, and comprehensive model comparison and result exploration. Such work is being driven by advances in interactive machine learning and the desire of end-users to understand and engage with the modeling process. However, despite the numerous and promising applications of visual analytics to predictive analytics tasks, work to assess the effectiveness of predictive visual analytics is lacking.

This thesis studies the current methodologies in predictive visual analytics. It first defines the scope of predictive analytics and presents a predictive visual analytics (PVA) pipeline. Following the proposed pipeline, a predictive visual analytics framework is developed to be used to explore under what circumstances a human-in-the-loop prediction process is most effective. This framework combines sentiment analysis, feature selection mechanisms, similarity comparisons and model cross-validation through a variety of interactive visualizations to support analysts in model building and prediction. To test the proposed framework, an instantiation for movie box-office prediction is developed and evaluated. Results from small-scale user studies are presented and discussed, and a generalized user study is carried out to assess the role of predictive visual analytics under a movie box-office prediction scenario.
ContributorsLu, Yafeng (Author) / Maciejewski, Ross (Thesis advisor) / Cooke, Nancy J. (Committee member) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / He, Jingrui (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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Description
Cyberbullying is a phenomenon which negatively affects individuals. Victims of the cyberbullying suffer from a range of mental issues, ranging from depression to low self-esteem. Due to the advent of the social media platforms, cyberbullying is becoming more and more prevalent. Traditional mechanisms to fight against cyberbullying include use of

Cyberbullying is a phenomenon which negatively affects individuals. Victims of the cyberbullying suffer from a range of mental issues, ranging from depression to low self-esteem. Due to the advent of the social media platforms, cyberbullying is becoming more and more prevalent. Traditional mechanisms to fight against cyberbullying include use of standards and guidelines, human moderators, use of blacklists based on profane words, and regular expressions to manually detect cyberbullying. However, these mechanisms fall short in social media and do not scale well. Users in social media use intentional evasive expressions like, obfuscation of abusive words, which necessitates the development of a sophisticated learning framework to automatically detect new cyberbullying behaviors. Cyberbullying detection in social media is a challenging task due to short, noisy and unstructured content and intentional obfuscation of the abusive words or phrases by social media users. Motivated by sociological and psychological findings on bullying behavior and its correlation with emotions, we propose to leverage the sentiment information to accurately detect cyberbullying behavior in social media by proposing an effective optimization framework. Experimental results on two real-world social media datasets show the superiority of the proposed framework. Further studies validate the effectiveness of leveraging sentiment information for cyberbullying detection.
ContributorsDani, Harsh (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Tong, Hanghang (Committee member) / He, Jingrui (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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Description
Attributes - that delineating the properties of data, and connections - that describing the dependencies of data, are two essential components to characterize most real-world phenomena. The synergy between these two principal elements renders a unique data representation - the attributed networks. In many cases, people are inundated with vast

Attributes - that delineating the properties of data, and connections - that describing the dependencies of data, are two essential components to characterize most real-world phenomena. The synergy between these two principal elements renders a unique data representation - the attributed networks. In many cases, people are inundated with vast amounts of data that can be structured into attributed networks, and their use has been attractive to researchers and practitioners in different disciplines. For example, in social media, users interact with each other and also post personalized content; in scientific collaboration, researchers cooperate and are distinct from peers by their unique research interests; in complex diseases studies, rich gene expression complements to the gene-regulatory networks. Clearly, attributed networks are ubiquitous and form a critical component of modern information infrastructure. To gain deep insights from such networks, it requires a fundamental understanding of their unique characteristics and be aware of the related computational challenges.

My dissertation research aims to develop a suite of novel learning algorithms to understand, characterize, and gain actionable insights from attributed networks, to benefit high-impact real-world applications. In the first part of this dissertation, I mainly focus on developing learning algorithms for attributed networks in a static environment at two different levels: (i) attribute level - by designing feature selection algorithms to find high-quality features that are tightly correlated with the network topology; and (ii) node level - by presenting network embedding algorithms to learn discriminative node embeddings by preserving node proximity w.r.t. network topology structure and node attribute similarity. As changes are essential components of attributed networks and the results of learning algorithms will become stale over time, in the second part of this dissertation, I propose a family of online algorithms for attributed networks in a dynamic environment to continuously update the learning results on the fly. In fact, developing application-aware learning algorithms is more desired with a clear understanding of the application domains and their unique intents. As such, in the third part of this dissertation, I am also committed to advancing real-world applications on attributed networks by incorporating the objectives of external tasks into the learning process.
ContributorsLi, Jundong (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Faloutsos, Christos (Committee member) / He, Jingrui (Committee member) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019