Jingxuan Li

Social network user influence sense-making and dynamics prediction

Identifying influential users and predicting their ‘‘network impact’’ on social networks have attracted tremendous interest from both academia and industry. Various definitions of ‘‘influence’’ and many methods for calculating influence scores have been provided for different empirical purposes and they often lack the in-depth analysis of the ‘‘characteristics’’ of the output influence. In addition, most of the developed algorithms and tools are mainly dependent on the static network structure instead of the dynamic diffusion process over the network, and are thus essentially based on descriptive models instead of predictive models. Consequently, very few existing works consider the dynamic propagation of influence in continuous time due to infinite steps for simulation. In this paper, we provide an evaluation framework to systematically measure the ‘‘characteristics’’ of the influence from the following three dimensions: (i) Monomorphism vs. Polymorphism; (ii) High Latency vs. Low Latency; and (iii) Information Inventor vs. Information Spreader. We propose a dynamic information propagation model based on Continuous-Time Markov Process to predict the influence dynamics of social network users, where the nodes in the propagation sequences are the users, and the edges connect users who refer to the same topic contiguously on time. Finally we present a comprehensive empirical study on a large-scale twitter dataset to compare the influence metrics within our proposed evaluation framework. Experimental results validate our ideas and demonstrate the prediction performance of our proposed algorithms.

FIU-Miner: a fast, integrated, and user-friendly system for data mining in distributed environment

The advent of Big Data era drives data analysts from different domains to use data mining techniques for data analysis. However, performing data analysis in a specific domain is not trivial; it often requires complex task configuration, onerous integration of algorithms, and efficient execution in distributed environments.Few efforts have been paid on developing effective tools to facilitate data analysts in conducting complex data analysis tasks. In this paper, we design and implement FIU-Miner, a Fast, Integrated, and User-friendly system to ease data analysis. FIU-Miner allows users to rapidly configure a complex data analysis task without writing a single line of code. It also helps users conveniently import and integrate different analysis programs. Further, it significantly balances resource utilization and task execution in heterogeneous environments. A case study of a real-world application demonstrates the efficacy and effectiveness of our proposed system.

Multi-document summarization via submodularity

Multi-document summarization is becoming an important issue in the Information Retrieval community. It aims to distill the most important information from a set of documents to generate a compressed summary. Given a set of documents as input, most of existing multi-document summarization approaches utilize different sentence selection techniques to extract a set of sentences from the document set as the summary. The submodularity hidden in the term coverage and the textual-unit similarity motivates us to incorporate this property into our solution to multi-document summarization tasks. In this paper, we propose a new principled and versatile framework for different multi-document summarization tasks using submodular functions (Nemhauser et al. in Math. Prog. 14(1):265–294, 1978) based on the term coverage and the textual-unit similarity which can be efficiently optimized through the improved greedy algorithm. We show that four known summarization tasks, including generic, query-focused, update, and comparative summarization, can be modeled as different variations derived from the proposed framework. Experiments on benchmark summarization data sets (e.g., DUC04-06, TAC08, TDT2 corpora) are conducted to demonstrate the efficacy and effectiveness of our proposed framework for the general multi-document summarization tasks.

MSSF: a multi-document summarization framework based on submodularity

Multi-document summarization aims to distill the most representative information from a set of documents to generate a summary. Given a set of documents as input, most of existing multi-document summarization approaches utilize different sentence selection techniques to extract a set of sentences from the document set as the summary. The submodularity hidden in textual-unit similarity motivates us to incorporate this property into our solution to multi-document summarization tasks. In this poster, we propose a new principled and versatile framework for different multi-document summarization tasks using the submodular function [8].

Hierarchical Co-Clustering: A New Way to Organize the Music Data

In music information retrieval (MIR) an important research topic, which has attracted much attention recently, is the utilization of user-assigned tags, artist-related style, and mood labels, which can be extracted from music listening web sites, such as Last.fm (http://www.last.fm/) and All Music Guide (http://www.allmusic.com/). A fundamental research problem in the area is how to understand the relationships among artists/songs and these different pieces of information. Co-clustering is the problem of simultaneously clustering two types of data (e.g., documents and words, and webpages and urls). We can naturally bring this idea to the situation at hand and consider clustering artists and tags together, artists and styles together, or artists and mood labels together. Once such co-clustering has been successfully completed, one can identify co-existing clusters of artists and tags, styles, or mood labels (T/S/M). For simplicity, we use the acronym T/S/M to refer to tag(s), style(s), or mood(s) for the rest of the paper. When dealing with tags it is worth noticing that some tags are more specific versions of others. This naturally suggests that the tags could be organized in hierarchical clusters. Such hierarchical organizations exist for styles and mood labels, so we will consider hierarchical co-clustering of artists and T/S/M. In this paper, we systematically study the application of hierarchical co-clustering (HCC) methods for organizing the music data. There are two standard strategies for hierarchical clustering. One is the divisive strategy, in which we attempt to divide the input data set into smaller groups recursively, and the other is the agglomerative strategy, in which we attempt to combine initially individually separated data points into larger groups by finding the most closely related pair at each iteration. We will compare these two strategies against each other. We apply a previously known divisive hierarchical co-clustering method and a novel agglomerative hierarchical co-clustering. In addition, we demonstrate that these two methods have the capability of incorporating instance-level constraints to achieve better performance. We perform experiments to show that these two hierarchical co-clustering methods can be effectively deployed for organizing the music data and they present reasonable clustering performance comparing with the other clustering methods. A case study is also conducted to show that HCC provides us a new method to quantify the artist similarity.

Applying data mining techniques to address critical process optimization needs in advanced manufacturing

Advanced manufacturing such as aerospace, semi-conductor, and flat display device often involves complex production processes, and generates large volume of production data. In general, the production data comes from products with different levels of quality, assembly line with complex flows and equipments, and processing craft with massive controlling parameters. The scale and complexity of data is beyond the analytic power of traditional IT infrastructures. To achieve better manufacturing performance, it is imperative to explore the underlying dependencies of the production data and exploit analytic insights to improve the production process. However, few research and industrial efforts have been reported on providing manufacturers with integrated data analytical solutions to reveal potentials and optimize the production process from data-driven perspectives. In this paper, we design, implement and deploy an integrated solution, named PDP-Miner, which is a data analytics platform customized for process optimization in Plasma Display Panel (PDP) manufacturing. The system utilizes the latest advances in data mining technologies and Big Data infrastructures to create a complete analytical solution. Besides, our proposed system is capable of supporting automatically configuring and scheduling analysis tasks, and balancing heterogeneous computing resources. The system and the analytic strategies can be applied to other advanced manufacturing fields to enable complex data analysis tasks. Since 2013, PDP-Miner has been deployed as the data analysis platform of ChangHong COC. By taking the advantages of our system, the overall PDP yield rate has increased from 91% to 94%. The monthly production is boosted by 10,000 panels, which brings more than 117 million RMB of revenue improvement per year.

Web Multimedia Object Classification Using Cross-Domain Correlation Knowledge

Given a collection of web images with the corresponding textual descriptions, in this paper, we propose a novel cross-domain learning method to classify these web multimedia objects by transferring the correlation knowledge among different information sources. Here, the knowledge is extracted from unlabeled objects through unsupervised learning and applied to perform supervised classification tasks. To mine more meaningful correlation knowledge, instead of using commonly used visual words in the traditional bag-of-visual-words (BoW) model, we discover higher level visual components (words and phrases) to incorporate the spatial and semantic information into our image representation model, i.e., bag-of-visual-phrases (BoP). By combining the enriched visual components with the textual words, we calculate the frequently co-occurring pairs among them to construct a cross-domain correlated graph in which the correlation knowledge is mined. After that, we investigate two different strategies to apply such knowledge to enrich the feature space where the supervised classification is performed. By transferring such knowledge, our cross-domain transfer learning method can not only handle large scale web multimedia objects, but also deal with the situation that the textual descriptions of a small portion of web images are missing. Empirical experiments on two different datasets of web multimedia objects are conducted to demonstrate the efficacy and effectiveness of our proposed cross-domain transfer learning method.

HCC: a hierarchical co-clustering algorithm

In this poster, we develop a novel method, called HCC, for hierarchical co-clustering. HCC brings together two interrelated but distinct themes from clustering: hierarchical clustering and co-clustering. The goal of the former theme is to organize clusters into a hierarchy that facilitates browsing and navigation, while the goal of the latter theme is to cluster different types of data simultaneously by making use of the relationship information. Our initial empirical results are promising and they demonstrate that simultaneously attempting both these goals in a single model leads to improvements over models that focus on a single goal.

Social Network User Influence Dynamics Prediction

Identifying influential users and predicting their “network impact” on social networks have attracted tremendous interest from both academia and industry. Most of the developed algorithms and tools are mainly dependent on the static network structure instead of the dynamic diffusion process over the network, and are thus essentially based on descriptive models instead of predictive models. In this paper, we propose a dynamic information propagation model based on Continuous-Time Markov Process to predict the influence dynamics of social network users, where the nodes in the propagation sequences are the users, and the edges connect users who refer to the same topic contiguously on time. Our proposed model is compared with two baselines, including a well-known time-series forecasting model – Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average and a widely accepted information diffusion model – Independent cascade. Experimental results validate our ideas and demonstrate the prediction performance of our proposed algorithms.

Ontology-enriched multi-document summarization in disaster management using submodular function

In disaster management, a myriad of news and reports relevant to the disaster may be recorded in the form of text document. A challenging problem is how to provide concise and informative reports from a large collection of documents, to help domain experts analyze the trend of the disaster. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of using a domain-specific ontology to facilitate the summarization task, and propose TELESUM, an ontology-enriched multi-document summarization approach, where the submodularity hidden in among ontological concepts is investigated. Empirical experiments on the collection of press releases by Miami-Dade County Department of Emergency Management during Hurricane Wilma in 2005 demonstrate the efficacy and effectiveness of TELESUM in disaster management. Further, our proposed framework can be extended to summarizing general documents by employing public ontologies, e.g., Wikipedia. Extensive evaluation on the generalized framework is conducted on DUC04-05 datasets, and shows that our method is competitive with other approaches.