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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
Data imbalance and data noise often coexist in real world datasets. Data imbalance affects the learning classifier by degrading the recognition power of the classifier on the minority class, while data noise affects the learning classifier by providing inaccurate information and thus misleads the classifier. Because of these differences, data

Data imbalance and data noise often coexist in real world datasets. Data imbalance affects the learning classifier by degrading the recognition power of the classifier on the minority class, while data noise affects the learning classifier by providing inaccurate information and thus misleads the classifier. Because of these differences, data imbalance and data noise have been treated separately in the data mining field. Yet, such approach ignores the mutual effects and as a result may lead to new problems. A desirable solution is to tackle these two issues jointly. Noting the complementary nature of generative and discriminative models, this research proposes a unified model fusion based framework to handle the imbalanced classification with noisy dataset.

The phase I study focuses on the imbalanced classification problem. A generative classifier, Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) is studied which can learn the distribution of the imbalance data to improve the discrimination power on imbalanced classes. By fusing this knowledge into cost SVM (cSVM), a CSG method is proposed. Experimental results show the effectiveness of CSG in dealing with imbalanced classification problems.

The phase II study expands the research scope to include the noisy dataset into the imbalanced classification problem. A model fusion based framework, K Nearest Gaussian (KNG) is proposed. KNG employs a generative modeling method, GMM, to model the training data as Gaussian mixtures and form adjustable confidence regions which are less sensitive to data imbalance and noise. Motivated by the K-nearest neighbor algorithm, the neighboring Gaussians are used to classify the testing instances. Experimental results show KNG method greatly outperforms traditional classification methods in dealing with imbalanced classification problems with noisy dataset.

The phase III study addresses the issues of feature selection and parameter tuning of KNG algorithm. To further improve the performance of KNG algorithm, a Particle Swarm Optimization based method (PSO-KNG) is proposed. PSO-KNG formulates model parameters and data features into the same particle vector and thus can search the best feature and parameter combination jointly. The experimental results show that PSO can greatly improve the performance of KNG with better accuracy and much lower computational cost.
ContributorsHe, Miao (Author) / Wu, Teresa (Thesis advisor) / Li, Jing (Committee member) / Silva, Alvin (Committee member) / Borror, Connie (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
Understanding customer preference is crucial for new product planning and marketing decisions. This thesis explores how historical data can be leveraged to understand and predict customer preference. This thesis presents a decision support framework that provides a holistic view on customer preference by following a two-phase procedure. Phase-1 uses cluster

Understanding customer preference is crucial for new product planning and marketing decisions. This thesis explores how historical data can be leveraged to understand and predict customer preference. This thesis presents a decision support framework that provides a holistic view on customer preference by following a two-phase procedure. Phase-1 uses cluster analysis to create product profiles based on which customer profiles are derived. Phase-2 then delves deep into each of the customer profiles and investigates causality behind their preference using Bayesian networks. This thesis illustrates the working of the framework using the case of Intel Corporation, world’s largest semiconductor manufacturing company.
ContributorsRam, Sudarshan Venkat (Author) / Kempf, Karl G. (Thesis advisor) / Wu, Teresa (Thesis advisor) / Ju, Feng (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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Description
Nonalcoholic Steatohepatitis (NASH) is a severe form of Nonalcoholic fatty liverdisease, that is caused due to excessive calorie intake, sedentary lifestyle and in the absence of severe alcohol consumption. It is widely prevalent in the United States and in many other developed countries, affecting up to 25 percent of the population. Due to

Nonalcoholic Steatohepatitis (NASH) is a severe form of Nonalcoholic fatty liverdisease, that is caused due to excessive calorie intake, sedentary lifestyle and in the absence of severe alcohol consumption. It is widely prevalent in the United States and in many other developed countries, affecting up to 25 percent of the population. Due to being asymptotic, it usually goes unnoticed and may lead to liver failure if not treated at the right time. Currently, liver biopsy is the gold standard to diagnose NASH, but being an invasive procedure, it comes with it's own complications along with the inconvenience of sampling repeated measurements over a period of time. Hence, noninvasive procedures to assess NASH are urgently required. Magnetic Resonance Elastography (MRE) based Shear Stiffness and Loss Modulus along with Magnetic Resonance Imaging based proton density fat fraction have been successfully combined to predict NASH stages However, their role in the prediction of disease progression still remains to be investigated. This thesis thus looks into combining features from serial MRE observations to develop statistical models to predict NASH progression. It utilizes data from an experiment conducted on male mice to develop progressive and regressive NASH and trains ordinal models, ordered probit regression and ordinal forest on labels generated from a logistic regression model. The models are assessed on histological data collected at the end point of the experiment. The models developed provide a framework to utilize a non-invasive tool to predict NASH disease progression.
ContributorsDeshpande, Eeshan (Author) / Ju, Feng (Thesis advisor) / Wu, Teresa (Committee member) / Yan, Hao (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021