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Description
Analysis of political texts, which contains a huge amount of personal political opinions, sentiments, and emotions towards powerful individuals, leaders, organizations, and a large number of people, is an interesting task, which can lead to discover interesting interactions between the political parties and people. Recently, political blogosphere plays an increasingly

Analysis of political texts, which contains a huge amount of personal political opinions, sentiments, and emotions towards powerful individuals, leaders, organizations, and a large number of people, is an interesting task, which can lead to discover interesting interactions between the political parties and people. Recently, political blogosphere plays an increasingly important role in politics, as a forum for debating political issues. Most of the political weblogs are biased towards their political parties, and they generally express their sentiments towards their issues (i.e. leaders, topics etc.,) and also towards issues of the opposing parties. In this thesis, I have modeled the above interactions/debate as a sentimental bi-partite graph, a bi-partite graph with Blogs forming vertices of a disjoint set, and the issues (i.e. leaders, topics etc.,) forming the other disjoint set,and the edges between the two sets representing the sentiment of the blogs towards the issues. I have used American Political blog data to model the sentimental bi- partite graph, in particular, a set of popular political liberal and conservative blogs that have clearly declared positions. These blogs contain discussion about social, political, economic issues and related key individuals in their conservative/liberal view. To be more focused and more polarized, 22 most popular liberal/conservative blogs of a particular time period, May 2008 - October 2008(because of high intensity of debate and discussions), just before the presidential elections, was considered, involving around 23,800 articles. This thesis involves solving the questions: a) which is the most liberal/conservative blogs on the web? b) Who is on which side of debate and what are the issues? c) Who are the important leaders? d) How do you model the relationship between the participants of the debate and the underlying issues?
ContributorsThirumalai, Dananjayan (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Sarjoughian, Hessam S. (Committee member) / Sen, Arunabha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Description
Muslim radicalism is recognized as one of the greatest security threats for the United States and the rest of the world. Use of force to eliminate specific radical entities is ineffective in containing radicalism as a whole. There is a need to understand the origin, ideologies and behavior of Radical

Muslim radicalism is recognized as one of the greatest security threats for the United States and the rest of the world. Use of force to eliminate specific radical entities is ineffective in containing radicalism as a whole. There is a need to understand the origin, ideologies and behavior of Radical and Counter-Radical organizations and how they shape up over a period of time. Recognizing and supporting counter-radical organizations is one of the most important steps towards impeding radical organizations. A lot of research has already been done to categorize and recognize organizations, to understand their behavior, their interactions with other organizations, their target demographics and the area of influence. We have a huge amount of information which is a result of the research done over these topics. This thesis provides a powerful and interactive way to navigate through all this information, using a Visualization Dashboard. The dashboard makes it easier for Social Scientists, Policy Analysts, Military and other personnel to visualize an organization's propensity towards violence and radicalism. It also tracks the peaking religious, political and socio-economic markers, their target demographics and locations. A powerful search interface with parametric search helps in narrowing down to specific scenarios and view the corresponding information related to the organizations. This tool helps to identify moderate Counter-Radical organizations and also has the potential of predicting the orientation of various organizations based on the current information.
ContributorsNair, Shreejay (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Dasgpta, Partha (Committee member) / Sen, Arunabha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Description
Twitter has become a very popular social media site that is used daily by many people and organizations. This paper will focus on the financial aspect of Twitter, as a process will be shown to be able to mine data about specific companies' stock prices. This was done by writing

Twitter has become a very popular social media site that is used daily by many people and organizations. This paper will focus on the financial aspect of Twitter, as a process will be shown to be able to mine data about specific companies' stock prices. This was done by writing a program to grab tweets about the stocks of the thirty companies in the Dow Jones.
ContributorsLarson, Grant Elliott (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis director) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2014-05
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Description
In recent years, there are increasing numbers of applications that use multi-variate time series data where multiple uni-variate time series coexist. However, there is a lack of systematic of multi-variate time series. This thesis focuses on (a) defining a simplified inter-related multi-variate time series (IMTS) model and (b) developing robust

In recent years, there are increasing numbers of applications that use multi-variate time series data where multiple uni-variate time series coexist. However, there is a lack of systematic of multi-variate time series. This thesis focuses on (a) defining a simplified inter-related multi-variate time series (IMTS) model and (b) developing robust multi-variate temporal (RMT) feature extraction algorithm that can be used for locating, filtering, and describing salient features in multi-variate time series data sets. The proposed RMT feature can also be used for supporting multiple analysis tasks, such as visualization, segmentation, and searching / retrieving based on multi-variate time series similarities. Experiments confirm that the proposed feature extraction algorithm is highly efficient and effective in identifying robust multi-scale temporal features of multi-variate time series.
ContributorsWang, Xiaolan (Author) / Candan, Kasim Selcuk (Thesis advisor) / Sapino, Maria Luisa (Committee member) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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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
In supervised learning, machine learning techniques can be applied to learn a model on

a small set of labeled documents which can be used to classify a larger set of unknown

documents. Machine learning techniques can be used to analyze a political scenario

in a given society. A lot of research has been

In supervised learning, machine learning techniques can be applied to learn a model on

a small set of labeled documents which can be used to classify a larger set of unknown

documents. Machine learning techniques can be used to analyze a political scenario

in a given society. A lot of research has been going on in this field to understand

the interactions of various people in the society in response to actions taken by their

organizations.

This paper talks about understanding the Russian influence on people in Latvia.

This is done by building an eeffective model learnt on initial set of documents

containing a combination of official party web-pages, important political leaders' social

networking sites. Since twitter is a micro-blogging site which allows people to post

their opinions on any topic, the model built is used for estimating the tweets sup-

porting the Russian and Latvian political organizations in Latvia. All the documents

collected for analysis are in Latvian and Russian languages which are rich in vocabulary resulting into huge number of features. Hence, feature selection techniques can

be used to reduce the vocabulary set relevant to the classification model. This thesis

provides a comparative analysis of traditional feature selection techniques and implementation of a new iterative feature selection method using EM and cross-domain

training along with supportive visualization tool. This method out performed other

feature selection methods by reducing the number of features up-to 50% along with

good model accuracy. The results from the classification are used to interpret user

behavior and their political influence patterns across organizations in Latvia using

interactive dashboard with combination of powerful widgets.
ContributorsBollapragada, Lakshmi Gayatri Niharika (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Sen, Arunabha (Committee member) / Hsiao, Ihan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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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
With the advent of Internet, the data being added online is increasing at enormous rate. Though search engines are using IR techniques to facilitate the search requests from users, the results are not effective towards the search query of the user. The search engine user has to go through certain

With the advent of Internet, the data being added online is increasing at enormous rate. Though search engines are using IR techniques to facilitate the search requests from users, the results are not effective towards the search query of the user. The search engine user has to go through certain webpages before getting at the webpage he/she wanted. This problem of Information Overload can be solved using Automatic Text Summarization. Summarization is a process of obtaining at abridged version of documents so that user can have a quick view to understand what exactly the document is about. Email threads from W3C are used in this system. Apart from common IR features like Term Frequency, Inverse Document Frequency, Term Rank, a variation of page rank based on graph model, which can cluster the words with respective to word ambiguity, is implemented. Term Rank also considers the possibility of co-occurrence of words with the corpus and evaluates the rank of the word accordingly. Sentences of email threads are ranked as per features and summaries are generated. System implemented the concept of pyramid evaluation in content selection. The system can be considered as a framework for Unsupervised Learning in text summarization.
ContributorsNadella, Sravan (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Sen, Arunabha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
The dawn of Internet of Things (IoT) has opened the opportunity for mainstream adoption of machine learning analytics. However, most research in machine learning has focused on discovery of new algorithms or fine-tuning the performance of existing algorithms. Little exists on the process of taking an algorithm from the lab-environment

The dawn of Internet of Things (IoT) has opened the opportunity for mainstream adoption of machine learning analytics. However, most research in machine learning has focused on discovery of new algorithms or fine-tuning the performance of existing algorithms. Little exists on the process of taking an algorithm from the lab-environment into the real-world, culminating in sustained value. Real-world applications are typically characterized by dynamic non-stationary systems with requirements around feasibility, stability and maintainability. Not much has been done to establish standards around the unique analytics demands of real-world scenarios.

This research explores the problem of the why so few of the published algorithms enter production and furthermore, fewer end up generating sustained value. The dissertation proposes a ‘Design for Deployment’ (DFD) framework to successfully build machine learning analytics so they can be deployed to generate sustained value. The framework emphasizes and elaborates the often neglected but immensely important latter steps of an analytics process: ‘Evaluation’ and ‘Deployment’. A representative evaluation framework is proposed that incorporates the temporal-shifts and dynamism of real-world scenarios. Additionally, the recommended infrastructure allows analytics projects to pivot rapidly when a particular venture does not materialize. Deployment needs and apprehensions of the industry are identified and gaps addressed through a 4-step process for sustainable deployment. Lastly, the need for analytics as a functional area (like finance and IT) is identified to maximize the return on machine-learning deployment.

The framework and process is demonstrated in semiconductor manufacturing – it is highly complex process involving hundreds of optical, electrical, chemical, mechanical, thermal, electrochemical and software processes which makes it a highly dynamic non-stationary system. Due to the 24/7 uptime requirements in manufacturing, high-reliability and fail-safe are a must. Moreover, the ever growing volumes mean that the system must be highly scalable. Lastly, due to the high cost of change, sustained value proposition is a must for any proposed changes. Hence the context is ideal to explore the issues involved. The enterprise use-cases are used to demonstrate the robustness of the framework in addressing challenges encountered in the end-to-end process of productizing machine learning analytics in dynamic read-world scenarios.
ContributorsShahapurkar, Som (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Ameresh, Ashish (Committee member) / He, Jingrui (Committee member) / Tuv, Eugene (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
Contemporary online social platforms present individuals with social signals in the form of news feed on their peers' activities. On networks such as Facebook, Quora, network operator decides how that information is shown to an individual. Then the user, with her own interests and resource constraints selectively acts on a

Contemporary online social platforms present individuals with social signals in the form of news feed on their peers' activities. On networks such as Facebook, Quora, network operator decides how that information is shown to an individual. Then the user, with her own interests and resource constraints selectively acts on a subset of items presented to her. The network operator again, shows that activity to a selection of peers, and thus creating a behavioral loop. That mechanism of interaction and information flow raises some very interesting questions such as: can network operator design social signals to promote a particular activity like sustainability, public health care awareness, or to promote a specific product? The focus of my thesis is to answer that question. In this thesis, I develop a framework to personalize social signals for users to guide their activities on an online platform. As the result, we gradually nudge the activity distribution on the platform from the initial distribution p to the target distribution q. My work is particularly applicable to guiding collaborations, guiding collective actions, and online advertising. In particular, I first propose a probabilistic model on how users behave and how information flows on the platform. The main part of this thesis after that discusses the Influence Individuals through Social Signals (IISS) framework. IISS consists of four main components: (1) Learner: it learns users' interests and characteristics from their historical activities using Bayesian model, (2) Calculator: it uses gradient descent method to compute the intermediate activity distributions, (3) Selector: it selects users who can be influenced to adopt or drop specific activities, (4) Designer: it personalizes social signals for each user. I evaluate the performance of IISS framework by simulation on several network topologies such as preferential attachment, small world, and random. I show that the framework gradually nudges users' activities to approach the target distribution. I use both simulation and mathematical method to analyse convergence properties such as how fast and how close we can approach the target distribution. When the number of activities is 3, I show that for about 45% of target distributions, we can achieve KL-divergence as low as 0.05. But for some other distributions KL-divergence can be as large as 0.5.
ContributorsLe, Tien D (Author) / Sundaram, Hari (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014