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Description
Fraud is defined as the utilization of deception for illegal gain by hiding the true nature of the activity. While organizations lose around $3.7 trillion in revenue due to financial crimes and fraud worldwide, they can affect all levels of society significantly. In this dissertation, I focus on credit card

Fraud is defined as the utilization of deception for illegal gain by hiding the true nature of the activity. While organizations lose around $3.7 trillion in revenue due to financial crimes and fraud worldwide, they can affect all levels of society significantly. In this dissertation, I focus on credit card fraud in online transactions. Every online transaction comes with a fraud risk and it is the merchant's liability to detect and stop fraudulent transactions. Merchants utilize various mechanisms to prevent and manage fraud such as automated fraud detection systems and manual transaction reviews by expert fraud analysts. Many proposed solutions mostly focus on fraud detection accuracy and ignore financial considerations. Also, the highly effective manual review process is overlooked. First, I propose Profit Optimizing Neural Risk Manager (PONRM), a selective classifier that (a) constitutes optimal collaboration between machine learning models and human expertise under industrial constraints, (b) is cost and profit sensitive. I suggest directions on how to characterize fraudulent behavior and assess the risk of a transaction. I show that my framework outperforms cost-sensitive and cost-insensitive baselines on three real-world merchant datasets. While PONRM is able to work with many supervised learners and obtain convincing results, utilizing probability outputs directly from the trained model itself can pose problems, especially in deep learning as softmax output is not a true uncertainty measure. This phenomenon, and the wide and rapid adoption of deep learning by practitioners brought unintended consequences in many situations such as in the infamous case of Google Photos' racist image recognition algorithm; thus, necessitated the utilization of the quantified uncertainty for each prediction. There have been recent efforts towards quantifying uncertainty in conventional deep learning methods (e.g., dropout as Bayesian approximation); however, their optimal use in decision making is often overlooked and understudied. Thus, I present a mixed-integer programming framework for selective classification called MIPSC, that investigates and combines model uncertainty and predictive mean to identify optimal classification and rejection regions. I also extend this framework to cost-sensitive settings (MIPCSC) and focus on the critical real-world problem, online fraud management and show that my approach outperforms industry standard methods significantly for online fraud management in real-world settings.
ContributorsYildirim, Mehmet Yigit (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Bakkaloglu, Bertan (Committee member) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Hsiao, Ihan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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Description
It is not merely an aggregation of static entities that a video clip carries, but alsoa variety of interactions and relations among these entities. Challenges still remain for a video captioning system to generate natural language descriptions focusing on the prominent interest and aligning with the latent aspects beyond observations. This work presents

It is not merely an aggregation of static entities that a video clip carries, but alsoa variety of interactions and relations among these entities. Challenges still remain for a video captioning system to generate natural language descriptions focusing on the prominent interest and aligning with the latent aspects beyond observations. This work presents a Commonsense knowledge Anchored Video cAptioNing (dubbed as CAVAN) approach. CAVAN exploits inferential commonsense knowledge to assist the training of video captioning model with a novel paradigm for sentence-level semantic alignment. Specifically, commonsense knowledge is queried to complement per training caption by querying a generic knowledge atlas ATOMIC, and form the commonsense- caption entailment corpus. A BERT based language entailment model trained from this corpus then serves as a commonsense discriminator for the training of video captioning model, and penalizes the model from generating semantically misaligned captions. With extensive empirical evaluations on MSR-VTT, V2C and VATEX datasets, CAVAN consistently improves the quality of generations and shows higher keyword hit rate. Experimental results with ablations validate the effectiveness of CAVAN and reveals that the use of commonsense knowledge contributes to the video caption generation.
ContributorsShao, Huiliang (Author) / Yang, Yezhou (Thesis advisor) / Jayasuriya, Suren (Committee member) / Xiao, Chaowei (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
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Description

Molecular pathology makes use of estimates of tumor content (tumor percentage) for pre-analytic and analytic purposes, such as molecular oncology testing, massive parallel sequencing, or next-generation sequencing (NGS), assessment of sample acceptability, accurate quantitation of variants, assessment of copy number changes (among other applications), determination of specimen viability for testing

Molecular pathology makes use of estimates of tumor content (tumor percentage) for pre-analytic and analytic purposes, such as molecular oncology testing, massive parallel sequencing, or next-generation sequencing (NGS), assessment of sample acceptability, accurate quantitation of variants, assessment of copy number changes (among other applications), determination of specimen viability for testing (since many assays require a minimum tumor content to report variants at the limit of detection) may all be improved with more accurate and reproducible estimates of tumor content. Currently, tumor percentages of samples submitted for molecular testing are estimated by visual examination of Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) stained tissue slides under the microscope by pathologists. These estimations can be automated, expedited, and rendered more accurate by applying machine learning methods on digital whole slide images (WSI).

ContributorsCirelli, Claire (Author) / Yang, Yezhou (Thesis director) / Yalim, Jason (Committee member) / Velu, Priya (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2022-05
Description
Animal pose estimation (APE) is utilized in preclinical research settings for various neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease (PD), Huntington's disease (HD) and multiple sclerosis. The technique includes real-time scoring of impairment in the animals during testing or video recording. This is a time-consuming operation prone to errors due to

Animal pose estimation (APE) is utilized in preclinical research settings for various neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease (PD), Huntington's disease (HD) and multiple sclerosis. The technique includes real-time scoring of impairment in the animals during testing or video recording. This is a time-consuming operation prone to errors due to visual fatigue. To overcome these shortcomings, APE automation by deep learning has been studied. The field of APE has gone through significant development backed by improvements in deep learning techniques. These developments have improved 2D and 3D pose estimation, 3D mesh reconstruction and behavior prediction capabilities. As a result, there are numerous sophisticated tools and datasets available today. Despite these developments, APE still lags behind human observer scoring with respect to accuracy and flexibility under complex scenarios. In this project, two critical challenges are being addressed within the context of neurological research focusing on PD. The first challenge is about the lack of comprehensive diverse datasets necessary for accurate training as well as for fine-tuning deep learning models. This is compounded by the inherent difficulty in working with uncooperative rodent subjects, whose unpredictable behaviors often impede reliable data collection. The second challenge focuses on reduction in variation of scores that result from being scored by different evaluators. This will also involve tackling bias and reducing human error for the purpose of reliable and accurate assessments. In order to address these issues, systematic data collection and deep learning in APE have been utilized to automate manual scoring procedures. This project will contribute to neurological research, particularly in understanding and treating disorders like PD. The goal is to improve methods used in assessing rodent behavior which could aid in developing effective therapeutics. The successful implementation of an automated scoring mechanism could set a new standard in neurological research, offering insights and methodologies that are more accurate and reliable.
ContributorsJanapareddi, Ajay Kumar (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Poste, George (Thesis advisor) / Kelley, Christy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
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Description
Manipulator motion planning has conventionally been solved using sampling and optimization-based algorithms that are agnostic to embodiment and environment configurations. However, these algorithms plan on a fixed environment representation approximated using shape primitives, and hence struggle to find solutions for cluttered and dynamic environments. Furthermore, these algorithms fail to produce

Manipulator motion planning has conventionally been solved using sampling and optimization-based algorithms that are agnostic to embodiment and environment configurations. However, these algorithms plan on a fixed environment representation approximated using shape primitives, and hence struggle to find solutions for cluttered and dynamic environments. Furthermore, these algorithms fail to produce solutions for complex unstructured environments under real-time bounds. Neural Motion Planners (NMPs) are an appealing alternative to algorithmic approaches as they can leverage parallel computing for planning while incorporating arbitrary environmental constraints directly from raw sensor observations. Contemporary NMPs successfully transfer to different environment variations, however, fail to generalize across embodiments. This thesis proposes "AnyNMP'', a generalist motion planning policy for zero-shot transfer across different robotic manipulators and environments. The policy is conditioned on semantically segmented 3D pointcloud representation of the workspace thus enabling implicit sim2real transfer. In the proposed approach, templates are formulated for manipulator kinematics and ground truth motion plans are collected for over 3 million procedurally sampled robots in randomized environments. The planning pipeline consists of a state validation model for differentiable collision detection and a sampling based planner for motion generation. AnyNMP has been validated on 5 different commercially available manipulators and showcases successful cross-embodiment planning, achieving an 80% average success rate on baseline benchmarks.
ContributorsRath, Prabin Kumar (Author) / Gopalan, Nakul (Thesis advisor) / Yu, Hongbin (Thesis advisor) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
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Description
Rapid intraoperative diagnosis of brain tumors is of great importance for planning treatment and guiding the surgeon about the extent of resection. Currently, the standard for the preliminary intraoperative tissue analysis is frozen section biopsy that has major limitations such as tissue freezing and cutting artifacts, sampling errors, lack of

Rapid intraoperative diagnosis of brain tumors is of great importance for planning treatment and guiding the surgeon about the extent of resection. Currently, the standard for the preliminary intraoperative tissue analysis is frozen section biopsy that has major limitations such as tissue freezing and cutting artifacts, sampling errors, lack of immediate interaction between the pathologist and the surgeon, and time consuming.

Handheld, portable confocal laser endomicroscopy (CLE) is being explored in neurosurgery for its ability to image histopathological features of tissue at cellular resolution in real time during brain tumor surgery. Over the course of examination of the surgical tumor resection, hundreds to thousands of images may be collected. The high number of images requires significant time and storage load for subsequent reviewing, which motivated several research groups to employ deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) to improve its utility during surgery. DCNNs have proven to be useful in natural and medical image analysis tasks such as classification, object detection, and image segmentation.

This thesis proposes using DCNNs for analyzing CLE images of brain tumors. Particularly, it explores the practicality of DCNNs in three main tasks. First, off-the shelf DCNNs were used to classify images into diagnostic and non-diagnostic. Further experiments showed that both ensemble modeling and transfer learning improved the classifier’s accuracy in evaluating the diagnostic quality of new images at test stage. Second, a weakly-supervised learning pipeline was developed for localizing key features of diagnostic CLE images from gliomas. Third, image style transfer was used to improve the diagnostic quality of CLE images from glioma tumors by transforming the histology patterns in CLE images of fluorescein sodium-stained tissue into the ones in conventional hematoxylin and eosin-stained tissue slides.

These studies suggest that DCNNs are opted for analysis of CLE images. They may assist surgeons in sorting out the non-diagnostic images, highlighting the key regions and enhancing their appearance through pattern transformation in real time. With recent advances in deep learning such as generative adversarial networks and semi-supervised learning, new research directions need to be followed to discover more promises of DCNNs in CLE image analysis.
ContributorsIzady Yazdanabadi, Mohammadhassan (Author) / Preul, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Yang, Yezhou (Thesis advisor) / Nakaji, Peter (Committee member) / Vernon, Brent (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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Description
Proliferation of social media websites and discussion forums in the last decade has resulted in social media mining emerging as an effective mechanism to extract consumer patterns. Most research on social media and pharmacovigilance have concentrated on

Adverse Drug Reaction (ADR) identification. Such methods employ a step of drug search followed

Proliferation of social media websites and discussion forums in the last decade has resulted in social media mining emerging as an effective mechanism to extract consumer patterns. Most research on social media and pharmacovigilance have concentrated on

Adverse Drug Reaction (ADR) identification. Such methods employ a step of drug search followed by classification of the associated text as consisting an ADR or not. Although this method works efficiently for ADR classifications, if ADR evidence is present in users posts over time, drug mentions fail to capture such ADRs. It also fails to record additional user information which may provide an opportunity to perform an in-depth analysis for lifestyle habits and possible reasons for any medical problems.

Pre-market clinical trials for drugs generally do not include pregnant women, and so their effects on pregnancy outcomes are not discovered early. This thesis presents a thorough, alternative strategy for assessing the safety profiles of drugs during pregnancy by utilizing user timelines from social media. I explore the use of a variety of state-of-the-art social media mining techniques, including rule-based and machine learning techniques, to identify pregnant women, monitor their drug usage patterns, categorize their birth outcomes, and attempt to discover associations between drugs and bad birth outcomes.

The technique used models user timelines as longitudinal patient networks, which provide us with a variety of key information about pregnancy, drug usage, and post-

birth reactions. I evaluate the distinct parts of the pipeline separately, validating the usefulness of each step. The approach to use user timelines in this fashion has produced very encouraging results, and can be employed for a range of other important tasks where users/patients are required to be followed over time to derive population-based measures.
ContributorsChandrashekar, Pramod Bharadwaj (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Gonzalez, Graciela (Thesis advisor) / Hsiao, Sharon (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
Online health forums provide a convenient channel for patients, caregivers, and medical professionals to share their experience, support and encourage each other, and form health communities. The fast growing content in health forums provides a large repository for people to seek valuable information. A forum user can issue a keyword

Online health forums provide a convenient channel for patients, caregivers, and medical professionals to share their experience, support and encourage each other, and form health communities. The fast growing content in health forums provides a large repository for people to seek valuable information. A forum user can issue a keyword query to search health forums regarding to some specific questions, e.g., what treatments are effective for a disease symptom? A medical researcher can discover medical knowledge in a timely and large-scale fashion by automatically aggregating the latest evidences emerging in health forums.

This dissertation studies how to effectively discover information in health forums. Several challenges have been identified. First, the existing work relies on the syntactic information unit, such as a sentence, a post, or a thread, to bind different pieces of information in a forum. However, most of information discovery tasks should be based on the semantic information unit, a patient. For instance, given a keyword query that involves the relationship between a treatment and side effects, it is expected that the matched keywords refer to the same patient. In this work, patient-centered mining is proposed to mine patient semantic information units. In a patient information unit, the health information, such as diseases, symptoms, treatments, effects, and etc., is connected by the corresponding patient.

Second, the information published in health forums has varying degree of quality. Some information includes patient-reported personal health experience, while others can be hearsay. In this work, a context-aware experience extraction framework is proposed to mine patient-reported personal health experience, which can be used for evidence-based knowledge discovery or finding patients with similar experience.

At last, the proposed patient-centered and experience-aware mining framework is used to build a patient health information database for effectively discovering adverse drug reactions (ADRs) from health forums. ADRs have become a serious health problem and even a leading cause of death in the United States. Health forums provide valuable evidences in a large scale and in a timely fashion through the active participation of patients, caregivers, and doctors. Empirical evaluation shows the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
ContributorsLiu, Yunzhong (Author) / Chen, Yi (Thesis advisor) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
Computational visual aesthetics has recently become an active research area. Existing state-of-art methods formulate this as a binary classification task where a given image is predicted to be beautiful or not. In many applications such as image retrieval and enhancement, it is more important to rank images based on their

Computational visual aesthetics has recently become an active research area. Existing state-of-art methods formulate this as a binary classification task where a given image is predicted to be beautiful or not. In many applications such as image retrieval and enhancement, it is more important to rank images based on their aesthetic quality instead of binary-categorizing them. Furthermore, in such applications, it may be possible that all images belong to the same category. Hence determining the aesthetic ranking of the images is more appropriate. To this end, a novel problem of ranking images with respect to their aesthetic quality is formulated in this work. A new data-set of image pairs with relative labels is constructed by carefully selecting images from the popular AVA data-set. Unlike in aesthetics classification, there is no single threshold which would determine the ranking order of the images across the entire data-set.

This problem is attempted using a deep neural network based approach that is trained on image pairs by incorporating principles from relative learning. Results show that such relative training procedure allows the network to rank the images with a higher accuracy than a state-of-art network trained on the same set of images using binary labels. Further analyzing the results show that training a model using the image pairs learnt better aesthetic features than training on same number of individual binary labelled images.

Additionally, an attempt is made at enhancing the performance of the system by incorporating saliency related information. Given an image, humans might fixate their vision on particular parts of the image, which they might be subconsciously intrigued to. I therefore tried to utilize the saliency information both stand-alone as well as in combination with the global and local aesthetic features by performing two separate sets of experiments. In both the cases, a standard saliency model is chosen and the generated saliency maps are convoluted with the images prior to passing them to the network, thus giving higher importance to the salient regions as compared to the remaining. Thus generated saliency-images are either used independently or along with the global and the local features to train the network. Empirical results show that the saliency related aesthetic features might already be learnt by the network as a sub-set of the global features from automatic feature extraction, thus proving the redundancy of the additional saliency module.
ContributorsGattupalli, Jaya Vijetha (Author) / Li, Baoxin (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Liang, Jianming (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
The widespread adoption of computer vision models is often constrained by the issue of domain mismatch. Models that are trained with data belonging to one distribution, perform poorly when tested with data from a different distribution. Variations in vision based data can be attributed to the following reasons, viz., differences

The widespread adoption of computer vision models is often constrained by the issue of domain mismatch. Models that are trained with data belonging to one distribution, perform poorly when tested with data from a different distribution. Variations in vision based data can be attributed to the following reasons, viz., differences in image quality (resolution, brightness, occlusion and color), changes in camera perspective, dissimilar backgrounds and an inherent diversity of the samples themselves. Machine learning techniques like transfer learning are employed to adapt computational models across distributions. Domain adaptation is a special case of transfer learning, where knowledge from a source domain is transferred to a target domain in the form of learned models and efficient feature representations.

The dissertation outlines novel domain adaptation approaches across different feature spaces; (i) a linear Support Vector Machine model for domain alignment; (ii) a nonlinear kernel based approach that embeds domain-aligned data for enhanced classification; (iii) a hierarchical model implemented using deep learning, that estimates domain-aligned hash values for the source and target data, and (iv) a proposal for a feature selection technique to reduce cross-domain disparity. These adaptation procedures are tested and validated across a range of computer vision applications like object classification, facial expression recognition, digit recognition, and activity recognition. The dissertation also provides a unique perspective of domain adaptation literature from the point-of-view of linear, nonlinear and hierarchical feature spaces. The dissertation concludes with a discussion on the future directions for research that highlight the role of domain adaptation in an era of rapid advancements in artificial intelligence.
ContributorsDemakethepalli Venkateswara, Hemanth (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Chakraborty, Shayok (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017