Synthesis Lectures on Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery – serie

We elaborate on data collection procedures, provide resources for blog data repositories, mention various visualization and analysis tools in Blogosphere, and explain conventional and novel evaluation methodologies, to help perform research in the Blogosphere.

Table of Contents: Ensembles Discovered / Predictive Learning and Decision Trees / Model Complexity, Model Selection and Regularization / Importance Sampling and the Classic Ensemble Methods / Rule Ensembles and Interpretation Statistics / Ensemble Complexity

This lecture, from a data mining perspective, introduces characteristics of social media, reviews representative tasks of computing with social media, and illustrates associated challenges.

Table of Contents: Introduction / A Model for Online Social Networks / Types of Privacy Disclosure / Statistical Methods for Inferring Information in Networks / Anonymity and Differential Privacy / Attacks and Privacy-preserving Mechanisms / Models of Information Sharing / Users' Privacy Risk / Management of Privacy Settings

Departing from many existing network models that view interconnected data as homogeneous graphs or networks, our semi-structured heterogeneous information network model leverages the rich semantics of typed nodes and links in a network and uncovers surprisingly rich knowledge from the network.

What does the Web look like? How can we find patterns, communities, outliers, in a social network? Which are the most central nodes in a network? These are the questions that motivate this work. Networks and graphs appear in many diverse settings, for example in social networks, computer-communication networks (intrusion detection, traffic management), protein-protein interaction networks in biology, document-text bipartite graphs in text retrieval, person-account graphs in financial fraud detection, and others. In this work, first we list several surprising patterns that real graphs tend to follow. Then we give a detailed list of generators that try to mirror these patterns. Generators are important, because they can help with "what if" scenarios, extrapolations, and anonymization. Then we provide a list of powerful tools for graph analysis, and specifically spectral methods (Singular Value Decomposition (SVD)), tensors, and case studies like the famous "pageRank" algorithm and the "HITS" algorithm for ranking web search results. Finally, we conclude with a survey of tools and observations from related fields like sociology, which provide complementary viewpoints. Table of Contents: Introduction / Patterns in Static Graphs / Patterns in Evolving Graphs / Patterns in Weighted Graphs / Discussion: The Structure of Specific Graphs / Discussion: Power Laws and Deviations / Summary of Patterns / Graph Generators / Preferential Attachment and Variants / Incorporating Geographical Information / The RMat / Graph Generation by Kronecker Multiplication / Summary and Practitioner's Guide / SVD, Random Walks, and Tensors / Tensors / Community Detection / Influence/Virus Propagation and Immunization / Case Studies / Social Networks / Other Related Work / Conclusions

Taking advantage of social media features, research in this nascent field spearheads the search for a way to provide provenance data to social media users, thus leveraging social media itself by mining it for the provenance data.

Outlier (or anomaly) detection is a very broad field which has been studied in the context of a large number of research areas like statistics, data mining, sensor networks, environmental science, distributed systems, spatio-temporal mining, etc. Initial research in outlier detection focused on time series-based outliers (in statistics). Since then, outlier detection has been studied on a large variety of data types including high-dimensional data, uncertain data, stream data, network data, time series data, spatial data, and spatio-temporal data. While there have been many tutorials and surveys for general outlier detection, we focus on outlier detection for temporal data in this book. A large number of applications generate temporal datasets. For example, in our everyday life, various kinds of records like credit, personnel, financial, judicial, medical, etc., are all temporal. This stresses the need for an organized and detailed study of outliers with respect to such temporal data.In the past decade, there has been a lot of research on various forms of temporal data including consecutive data snapshots, series of data snapshots and data streams. Besides the initial work on time series, researchers have focused on rich forms of data including multiple data streams, spatio-temporal data, network data, community distribution data, etc. Compared to general outlier detection, techniques for temporal outlier detection are very different. In this book, we will present an organized picture of both recent and past research in temporal outlier detection. We start with the basics and then ramp up the reader to the main ideas in state-of-the-art outlier detection techniques. We motivate the importance of temporal outlier detection and brief the challenges beyond usual outlier detection. Then, we list down a taxonomy of proposed techniques for temporal outlier detection. Such techniques broadly include statistical techniques (like AR models, Markov models, histograms, neuralnetworks), distance- and density-based approaches, grouping-based approaches (clustering, community detection), network-based approaches, and spatio-temporal outlier detection approaches. We summarize by presenting a wide collection of applications where temporal outlier detection techniques have been applied to discover interesting outliers. Table of Contents: Preface / Acknowledgments / Figure Credits / Introduction and Challenges / Outlier Detection for Time Series and Data Sequences / Outlier Detection for Data Streams / Outlier Detection for Distributed Data Streams / Outlier Detection for Spatio-Temporal Data / Outlier Detection for Temporal Network Data / Applications of Outlier Detection for Temporal Data / Conclusions and Research Directions / Bibliography / Authors' Biographies

We focus our attention on methods based on latent factors, such as mixture models, probabilistic matrix factorization, and topic models, for explicit and implicit preference data.

The "big data" era is characterized by an explosion of information in the form of digital data collections, ranging from scientific knowledge, to social media, news, and everyone's daily life.

In recent years, there has been a rapid growth of location-based social networking services, such as Foursquare and Facebook Places, which have attracted an increasing number of users and greatly enriched their urban experience. Typical location-based social networking sites allow a user to "check in" at a real-world POI (point of interest, e.g., a hotel, restaurant, theater, etc.), leave tips toward the POI, and share the check-in with their online friends. The check-in action bridges the gap between real world and online social networks, resulting in a new type of social networks, namely location-based social networks (LBSNs). Compared to traditional GPS data, location-based social networks data contains unique properties with abundant heterogeneous information to reveal human mobility, i.e., "when and where a user (who) has been to for what," corresponding to an unprecedented opportunity to better understand human mobility from spatial, temporal, social, and content aspects. The mining and understanding of human mobility can further lead to effective approaches to improve current location-based services from mobile marketing to recommender systems, providing users more convenient life experience than before. This book takes a data mining perspective to offer an overview of studying human mobility in location-based social networks and illuminate a wide range of related computational tasks. It introduces basic concepts, elaborates associated challenges, reviews state-of-the-art algorithms with illustrative examples and real-world LBSN datasets, and discusses effective evaluation methods in mining human mobility. In particular, we illustrate unique characteristics and research opportunities of LBSN data, present representative tasks of mining human mobility on location-based social networks, including capturing user mobility patterns to understand when and where a user commonly goes (location prediction), and exploiting user preferences and location profiles to investigate where and when a user wants to explore (location recommendation), along with studying a user's check-in activity in terms of why a user goes to a certain location.

Exploratory causal analysis (ECA) provides a framework for exploring potential causal structures in time series data sets and is characterized by a myopic goal to determine which data series from a given set of series might be seen as the primary driver.

A lot of digital ink has been spilled on "big data" over the past few years. Most of this surge owes its origin to the various types of unstructured data in the wild, among which the proliferation of text-heavy data is particularly overwhelming, attributed to the daily use of web documents, business reviews, news, social posts, etc., by so many people worldwide.A core challenge presents itself: How can one efficiently and effectively turn massive, unstructured text into structured representation so as to further lay the foundation for many other downstream text mining applications?In this book, we investigated one promising paradigm for representing unstructured text, that is, through automatically identifying high-quality phrases from innumerable documents. In contrast to a list of frequent n-grams without proper filtering, users are often more interested in results based on variable-length phrases with certain semantics such as scientific concepts, organizations, slogans,and so on. We propose new principles and powerful methodologies to achieve this goal, from the scenario where a user can provide meaningful guidance to a fully automated setting through distant learning. This book also introduces applications enabled by the mined phrases and points out some promising research directions.

Graphs naturally represent information ranging from links between web pages, to communication in email networks, to connections between neurons in our brains. These graphs often span billions of nodes and interactions between them. Within this deluge of interconnected data, how can we find the most important structures and summarize them? How can we efficiently visualize them? How can we detect anomalies that indicate critical events, such as an attack on a computer system, disease formation in the human brain, or the fall of a company?This book presents scalable, principled discovery algorithms that combine globality with locality to make sense of one or more graphs. In addition to fast algorithmic methodologies, we also contribute graph-theoretical ideas and models, and real-world applications in two main areas:Individual Graph Mining: We show how to interpretably summarize a single graph by identifying its important graph structures. We complement summarization with inference, which leverages information about few entities (obtained via summarization or other methods) and the network structure to efficiently and effectively learn information about the unknown entities.Collective Graph Mining: We extend the idea of individual-graph summarization to time-evolving graphs, and show how to scalably discover temporal patterns. Apart from summarization, we claim that graph similarity is often the underlying problem in a host of applications where multiple graphs occur (e.g., temporal anomaly detection, discovery of behavioral patterns), and we present principled, scalable algorithms for aligning networks and measuring their similarity.The methods that we present in this book leverage techniques from diverse areas, such as matrix algebra, graph theory, optimization, information theory, machine learning, finance, and social science,to solve real-world problems. We present applications of our exploration algorithms to massive datasets, including a Web graph of 6.6 billion edges, a Twitter graph of 1.8 billion edges, brain graphs with up to 90 million edges, collaboration, peer-to-peer networks, browser logs, all spanning millions of users and interactions.

Departing from many existing structure extraction methods that have heavy reliance on human annotated data for model training, our effort-light approach leverages human-curated facts stored in external knowledge bases as distant supervision and exploits rich data redundancy in large text corpora for context understanding.

In general, EPs are useful for classification, clustering, outlier detection, gene ranking for complex diseases, prediction model analysis and improvement, and so on.EPs are useful for many tasks because they represent group differences, which have extraordinary power.

However, acquiring such multidimensional knowledge from massive text data remains a challenging task.This book presents data mining techniques that turn unstructured text data into multidimensional knowledge.

This book, from a data mining perspective, introduces the basic concepts and characteristics of fake news across disciplines, reviews representative fake news detection methods in a principled way, and illustrates challenging issues of fake news detection on social media.

It is ubiquitous in our daily life, ranging from product taxonomies used by online retailers, topic taxonomies deployed by news outlets and social media, as well as scientific taxonomies deployed by digital libraries across various domains.

It is ubiquitous in our daily life, ranging from product taxonomies used by online retailers, topic taxonomies deployed by news outlets and social media, as well as scientific taxonomies deployed by digital libraries across various domains.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the foundations and frontiers of graph neural networks. In addition, the book introduces the basic concepts and definitions in graph representation learning and discusses the development of advanced graph representation learning methods with a focus on graph neural networks.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the foundations and frontiers of graph neural networks. In addition, the book introduces the basic concepts and definitions in graph representation learning and discusses the development of advanced graph representation learning methods with a focus on graph neural networks.

Given a set of objects and a pairwise similarity measure between them, the goal of correlation clustering is to partition the objects in a set of clusters to maximize the similarity of the objects within the same cluster and minimize the similarity of the objects in different clusters.