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Description
With the rapid development of mobile sensing technologies like GPS, RFID, sensors in smartphones, etc., capturing position data in the form of trajectories has become easy. Moving object trajectory analysis is a growing area of interest these days owing to its applications in various domains such as marketing, security, traffic

With the rapid development of mobile sensing technologies like GPS, RFID, sensors in smartphones, etc., capturing position data in the form of trajectories has become easy. Moving object trajectory analysis is a growing area of interest these days owing to its applications in various domains such as marketing, security, traffic monitoring and management, etc. To better understand movement behaviors from the raw mobility data, this doctoral work provides analytic models for analyzing trajectory data. As a first contribution, a model is developed to detect changes in trajectories with time. If the taxis moving in a city are viewed as sensors that provide real time information of the traffic in the city, a change in these trajectories with time can reveal that the road network has changed. To detect changes, trajectories are modeled with a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). A modified training algorithm, for parameter estimation in HMM, called m-BaumWelch, is used to develop likelihood estimates under assumed changes and used to detect changes in trajectory data with time. Data from vehicles are used to test the method for change detection. Secondly, sequential pattern mining is used to develop a model to detect changes in frequent patterns occurring in trajectory data. The aim is to answer two questions: Are the frequent patterns still frequent in the new data? If they are frequent, has the time interval distribution in the pattern changed? Two different approaches are considered for change detection, frequency-based approach and distribution-based approach. The methods are illustrated with vehicle trajectory data. Finally, a model is developed for clustering and outlier detection in semantic trajectories. A challenge with clustering semantic trajectories is that both numeric and categorical attributes are present. Another problem to be addressed while clustering is that trajectories can be of different lengths and also have missing values. A tree-based ensemble is used to address these problems. The approach is extended to outlier detection in semantic trajectories.
ContributorsKondaveeti, Anirudh (Author) / Runger, George C. (Thesis advisor) / Mirchandani, Pitu (Committee member) / Pan, Rong (Committee member) / Maciejewski, Ross (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Description
This dissertation addresses the research challenge of developing efficient new methods for discovering useful patterns and knowledge in large volumes of electronically collected spatiotemporal activity data. I propose to analyze three types of such spatiotemporal activity data in a methodological framework that integrates spatial analysis, data mining, machine learning, and

This dissertation addresses the research challenge of developing efficient new methods for discovering useful patterns and knowledge in large volumes of electronically collected spatiotemporal activity data. I propose to analyze three types of such spatiotemporal activity data in a methodological framework that integrates spatial analysis, data mining, machine learning, and geovisualization techniques. Three different types of spatiotemporal activity data were collected through different data collection approaches: (1) crowd sourced geo-tagged digital photos, representing people's travel activity, were retrieved from the website Panoramio.com through information retrieval techniques; (2) the same techniques were used to crawl crowd sourced GPS trajectory data and related metadata of their daily activities from the website OpenStreetMap.org; and finally (3) preschool children's daily activities and interactions tagged with time and geographical location were collected with a novel TabletPC-based behavioral coding system. The proposed methodology is applied to these data to (1) automatically recommend optimal multi-day and multi-stay travel itineraries for travelers based on discovered attractions from geo-tagged photos, (2) automatically detect movement types of unknown moving objects from GPS trajectories, and (3) explore dynamic social and socio-spatial patterns of preschool children's behavior from both geographic and social perspectives.
ContributorsLi, Xun (Author) / Anselin, Luc (Thesis advisor) / Koschinsky, Julia (Committee member) / Maciejewski, Ross (Committee member) / Rey, Sergio (Committee member) / Griffin, William (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Description
In a healthcare setting, the Sterile Processing Department (SPD) provides ancillary services to the Operating Room (OR), Emergency Room, Labor & Delivery, and off-site clinics. SPD's function is to reprocess reusable surgical instruments and return them to their home departments. The management of surgical instruments and medical devices can impact

In a healthcare setting, the Sterile Processing Department (SPD) provides ancillary services to the Operating Room (OR), Emergency Room, Labor & Delivery, and off-site clinics. SPD's function is to reprocess reusable surgical instruments and return them to their home departments. The management of surgical instruments and medical devices can impact patient safety and hospital revenue. Any time instrumentation or devices are not available or are not fit for use, patient safety and revenue can be negatively impacted. One step of the instrument reprocessing cycle is sterilization. Steam sterilization is the sterilization method used for the majority of surgical instruments and is preferred to immediate use steam sterilization (IUSS) because terminally sterilized items can be stored until needed. IUSS Items must be used promptly and cannot be stored for later use. IUSS is intended for emergency situations and not as regular course of action. Unfortunately, IUSS is used to compensate for inadequate inventory levels, scheduling conflicts, and miscommunications. If IUSS is viewed as an adverse event, then monitoring IUSS incidences can help healthcare organizations meet patient safety goals and financial goals along with aiding in process improvement efforts. This work recommends statistical process control methods to IUSS incidents and illustrates the use of control charts for IUSS occurrences through a case study and analysis of the control charts for data from a health care provider. Furthermore, this work considers the application of data mining methods to IUSS occurrences and presents a representative example of data mining to the IUSS occurrences. This extends the application of statistical process control and data mining in healthcare applications.
ContributorsWeart, Gail (Author) / Runger, George C. (Thesis advisor) / Li, Jing (Committee member) / Shunk, Dan (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
Social networking services have emerged as an important platform for large-scale information sharing and communication. With the growing popularity of social media, spamming has become rampant in the platforms. Complex network interactions and evolving content present great challenges for social spammer detection. Different from some existing well-studied platforms, distinct characteristics

Social networking services have emerged as an important platform for large-scale information sharing and communication. With the growing popularity of social media, spamming has become rampant in the platforms. Complex network interactions and evolving content present great challenges for social spammer detection. Different from some existing well-studied platforms, distinct characteristics of newly emerged social media data present new challenges for social spammer detection. First, texts in social media are short and potentially linked with each other via user connections. Second, it is observed that abundant contextual information may play an important role in distinguishing social spammers and normal users. Third, not only the content information but also the social connections in social media evolve very fast. Fourth, it is easy to amass vast quantities of unlabeled data in social media, but would be costly to obtain labels, which are essential for many supervised algorithms. To tackle those challenges raise in social media data, I focused on developing effective and efficient machine learning algorithms for social spammer detection.

I provide a novel and systematic study of social spammer detection in the dissertation. By analyzing the properties of social network and content information, I propose a unified framework for social spammer detection by collectively using the two types of information in social media. Motivated by psychological findings in physical world, I investigate whether sentiment analysis can help spammer detection in online social media. In particular, I conduct an exploratory study to analyze the sentiment differences between spammers and normal users; and present a novel method to incorporate sentiment information into social spammer detection framework. Given the rapidly evolving nature, I propose a novel framework to efficiently reflect the effect of newly emerging social spammers. To tackle the problem of lack of labeling data in social media, I study how to incorporate network information into text content modeling, and design strategies to select the most representative and informative instances from social media for labeling. Motivated by publicly available label information from other media platforms, I propose to make use of knowledge learned from cross-media to help spammer detection on social media.
ContributorsHu, Xia, Ph.D (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Faloutsos, Christos (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
Sarcasm is a nuanced form of language where usually, the speaker explicitly states the opposite of what is implied. Imbued with intentional ambiguity and subtlety, detecting sarcasm is a difficult task, even for humans. Current works approach this challenging problem primarily from a linguistic perspective, focusing on the lexical and

Sarcasm is a nuanced form of language where usually, the speaker explicitly states the opposite of what is implied. Imbued with intentional ambiguity and subtlety, detecting sarcasm is a difficult task, even for humans. Current works approach this challenging problem primarily from a linguistic perspective, focusing on the lexical and syntactic aspects of sarcasm. In this thesis, I explore the possibility of using behavior traits intrinsic to users of sarcasm to detect sarcastic tweets. First, I theorize the core forms of sarcasm using findings from the psychological and behavioral sciences, and some observations on Twitter users. Then, I develop computational features to model the manifestations of these forms of sarcasm using the user's profile information and tweets. Finally, I combine these features to train a supervised learning model to detect sarcastic tweets. I perform experiments to extensively evaluate the proposed behavior modeling approach and compare with the state-of-the-art.
ContributorsRajadesingan, Ashwin (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Committee member) / Pon-Barry, Heather (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
Social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and blogs have emerged as valuable

- in fact, the de facto - virtual town halls for people to discover, report, share and

communicate with others about various types of events. These events range from

widely-known events such as the U.S Presidential debate to smaller scale,

Social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and blogs have emerged as valuable

- in fact, the de facto - virtual town halls for people to discover, report, share and

communicate with others about various types of events. These events range from

widely-known events such as the U.S Presidential debate to smaller scale, local events

such as a local Halloween block party. During these events, we often witness a large

amount of commentary contributed by crowds on social media. This burst of social

media responses surges with the "second-screen" behavior and greatly enriches the

user experience when interacting with the event and people's awareness of an event.

Monitoring and analyzing this rich and continuous flow of user-generated content can

yield unprecedentedly valuable information about the event, since these responses

usually offer far more rich and powerful views about the event that mainstream news

simply could not achieve. Despite these benefits, social media also tends to be noisy,

chaotic, and overwhelming, posing challenges to users in seeking and distilling high

quality content from that noise.

In this dissertation, I explore ways to leverage social media as a source of information and analyze events based on their social media responses collectively. I develop, implement and evaluate EventRadar, an event analysis toolbox which is able to identify, enrich, and characterize events using the massive amounts of social media responses. EventRadar contains three automated, scalable tools to handle three core event analysis tasks: Event Characterization, Event Recognition, and Event Enrichment. More specifically, I develop ET-LDA, a Bayesian model and SocSent, a matrix factorization framework for handling the Event Characterization task, i.e., modeling characterizing an event in terms of its topics and its audience's response behavior (via ET-LDA), and the sentiments regarding its topics (via SocSent). I also develop DeMa, an unsupervised event detection algorithm for handling the Event Recognition task, i.e., detecting trending events from a stream of noisy social media posts. Last, I develop CrowdX, a spatial crowdsourcing system for handling the Event Enrichment task, i.e., gathering additional first hand information (e.g., photos) from the field to enrich the given event's context.

Enabled by EventRadar, it is more feasible to uncover patterns that have not been

explored previously and re-validating existing social theories with new evidence. As a

result, I am able to gain deep insights into how people respond to the event that they

are engaged in. The results reveal several key insights into people's various responding

behavior over the event's timeline such the topical context of people's tweets does not

always correlate with the timeline of the event. In addition, I also explore the factors

that affect a person's engagement with real-world events on Twitter and find that

people engage in an event because they are interested in the topics pertaining to

that event; and while engaging, their engagement is largely affected by their friends'

behavior.
ContributorsHu, Yuheng (Author) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Thesis advisor) / Horvitz, Eric (Committee member) / Krumm, John (Committee member) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Sundaram, Hari (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
The subliminal impact of framing of social, political and environmental issues such as climate change has been studied for decades in political science and communications research. Media framing offers an “interpretative package" for average citizens on how to make sense of climate change and its consequences to their livelihoods, how

The subliminal impact of framing of social, political and environmental issues such as climate change has been studied for decades in political science and communications research. Media framing offers an “interpretative package" for average citizens on how to make sense of climate change and its consequences to their livelihoods, how to deal with its negative impacts, and which mitigation or adaptation policies to support. A line of related work has used bag of words and word-level features to detect frames automatically in text. Such works face limitations since standard keyword based features may not generalize well to accommodate surface variations in text when different keywords are used for similar concepts.

This thesis develops a unique type of textual features that generalize triplets extracted from text, by clustering them into high-level concepts. These concepts are utilized as features to detect frames in text. Compared to uni-gram and bi-gram based models, classification and clustering using generalized concepts yield better discriminating features and a higher classification accuracy with a 12% boost (i.e. from 74% to 83% F-measure) and 0.91 clustering purity for Frame/Non-Frame detection.

The automatic discovery of complex causal chains among interlinked events and their participating actors has not yet been thoroughly studied. Previous studies related to extracting causal relationships from text were based on laborious and incomplete hand-developed lists of explicit causal verbs, such as “causes" and “results in." Such approaches result in limited recall because standard causal verbs may not generalize well to accommodate surface variations in texts when different keywords and phrases are used to express similar causal effects. Therefore, I present a system that utilizes generalized concepts to extract causal relationships. The proposed algorithms overcome surface variations in written expressions of causal relationships and discover the domino effects between climate events and human security. This semi-supervised approach alleviates the need for labor intensive keyword list development and annotated datasets. Experimental evaluations by domain experts achieve an average precision of 82%. Qualitative assessments of causal chains show that results are consistent with the 2014 IPCC report illuminating causal mechanisms underlying the linkages between climatic stresses and social instability.
ContributorsAlashri, Saud (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Desouza, Kevin C. (Committee member) / Maciejewski, Ross (Committee member) / Hsiao, Sharon (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
This work explores the development of a visual analytics tool for geodemographic exploration in an online environment. We mine 78 million records from the United States white pages, link the location data to demographic data (specifically income) from the United States Census Bureau, and allow users to interactively compare distributions

This work explores the development of a visual analytics tool for geodemographic exploration in an online environment. We mine 78 million records from the United States white pages, link the location data to demographic data (specifically income) from the United States Census Bureau, and allow users to interactively compare distributions of names with regards to spatial location similarity and income. In order to enable interactive similarity exploration, we explore methods of pre-processing the data as well as on-the-fly lookups. As data becomes larger and more complex, the development of appropriate data storage and analytics solutions has become even more critical when enabling online visualization. We discuss problems faced in implementation, design decisions and directions for future work.
ContributorsIbarra, Jose Luis (Author) / Maciejewski, Ross (Thesis director) / Mack, Elizabeth (Committee member) / Longley, Paul (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2014-05
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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