arXiv subjects

Huan Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Huan Liu.

At least 325 records · Page 18Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Causal Interpretability for Machine Learning -- Problems, Methods and Evaluation

Machine learning models have had discernible achievements in a myriad of applications. However, most of these models are black-boxes, and it is obscure how the decisions are made by them. This makes the models unreliable and untrustworthy. To provide insights into the decision making processes of these models, a variety of traditional interpretable models have been proposed. Moreover, to generate more human-friendly explanations, recent work on interpretability tries to answer questions related to causality such as "Why does this model makes such decisions?" or "Was it a specific feature that caused the decision made by the model?". In this work, models that aim to answer causal questions are referred to as causal interpretable models. The existing surveys have covered concepts and methodologies of traditional interpretability. In this work, we present a comprehensive survey on causal interpretable models from the aspects of the problems and methods. In addition, this survey provides in-depth insights into the existing evaluation metrics for measuring interpretability, which can help practitioners understand for what scenarios each evaluation metric is suitable.

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arXiv2020

Multi-task Generative Adversarial Learning on Geometrical Shape Reconstruction from EEG Brain Signals

Synthesizing geometrical shapes from human brain activities is an interesting and meaningful but very challenging topic. Recently, the advancements of deep generative models like Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have supported the object generation from neurological signals. However, the Electroencephalograph (EEG)-based shape generation still suffer from the low realism problem. In particular, the generated geometrical shapes lack clear edges and fail to contain necessary details. In light of this, we propose a novel multi-task generative adversarial network to convert the individual's EEG signals evoked by geometrical shapes to the original geometry. First, we adopt a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to learn highly informative latent representation for the raw EEG signals, which is vital for the subsequent shape reconstruction. Next, we build the discriminator based on multi-task learning to distinguish and classify fake samples simultaneously, where the mutual promotion between different tasks improves the quality of the recovered shapes. Then, we propose a semantic alignment constraint in order to force the synthesized samples to approach the real ones in pixel-level, thus producing more compelling shapes. The proposed approach is evaluated over a local dataset and the results show that our model outperforms the competitive state-of-the-art baselines.

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arXiv2020

Feature Interaction-aware Graph Neural Networks

Inspired by the immense success of deep learning, graph neural networks (GNNs) are widely used to learn powerful node representations and have demonstrated promising performance on different graph learning tasks. However, most real-world graphs often come with high-dimensional and sparse node features, rendering the learned node representations from existing GNN architectures less expressive. In this paper, we propose \textit{Feature Interaction-aware Graph Neural Networks (FI-GNNs)}, a plug-and-play GNN framework for learning node representations encoded with informative feature interactions. Specifically, the proposed framework is able to highlight informative feature interactions in a personalized manner and further learn highly expressive node representations on feature-sparse graphs. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate the superior capability of FI-GNNs for graph learning tasks.

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arXiv2020

Social Science Guided Feature Engineering: A Novel Approach to Signed Link Analysis

Many real-world relations can be represented by signed networks with positive links (e.g., friendships and trust) and negative links (e.g., foes and distrust). Link prediction helps advance tasks in social network analysis such as recommendation systems. Most existing work on link analysis focuses on unsigned social networks. The existence of negative links piques research interests in investigating whether properties and principles of signed networks differ from those of unsigned networks, and mandates dedicated efforts on link analysis for signed social networks. Recent findings suggest that properties of signed networks substantially differ from those of unsigned networks and negative links can be of significant help in signed link analysis in complementary ways. In this article, we center our discussion on a challenging problem of signed link analysis. Signed link analysis faces the problem of data sparsity, i.e. only a small percentage of signed links are given. This problem can even get worse when negative links are much sparser than positive ones as users are inclined more towards positive disposition rather than negative. We investigate how we can take advantage of other sources of information for signed link analysis. This research is mainly guided by three social science theories, Emotional Information, Diffusion of Innovations, and Individual Personality. Guided by these, we extract three categories of related features and leverage them for signed link analysis. Experiments show the significance of the features gleaned from social theories for signed link prediction and addressing the data sparsity challenge.

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arXiv2020

Mining Disinformation and Fake News: Concepts, Methods, and Recent Advancements

In recent years, disinformation including fake news, has became a global phenomenon due to its explosive growth, particularly on social media. The wide spread of disinformation and fake news can cause detrimental societal effects. Despite the recent progress in detecting disinformation and fake news, it is still non-trivial due to its complexity, diversity, multi-modality, and costs of fact-checking or annotation. The goal of this chapter is to pave the way for appreciating the challenges and advancements via: (1) introducing the types of information disorder on social media and examine their differences and connections; (2) describing important and emerging tasks to combat disinformation for characterization, detection and attribution; and (3) discussing a weak supervision approach to detect disinformation with limited labeled data. We then provide an overview of the chapters in this book that represent the recent advancements in three related parts: (1) user engagements in the dissemination of information disorder; (2) techniques on detecting and mitigating disinformation; and (3) trending issues such as ethics, blockchain, clickbaits, etc. We hope this book to be a convenient entry point for researchers, practitioners, and students to understand the problems and challenges, learn state-of-the-art solutions for their specific needs, and quickly identify new research problems in their domains.

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arXiv2019

Counterfactual Evaluation of Treatment Assignment Functions with Networked Observational Data

Counterfactual evaluation of novel treatment assignment functions (e.g., advertising algorithms and recommender systems) is one of the most crucial causal inference problems for practitioners. Traditionally, randomized controlled trials (A/B tests) are performed to evaluate treatment assignment functions. However, such trials can be time-consuming, expensive, and even unethical in some cases. Therefore, offline counterfactual evaluation of treatment assignment functions becomes a pressing issue because a massive amount of observational data is available in today's big data era. Counterfactual evaluation requires handling the hidden confounders -- the unmeasured features which causally influence both the treatment assignment and the outcome. To deal with the hidden confounders, most of the existing methods rely on the assumption of no hidden confounders. However, this assumption can be untenable in the context of massive observational data. When such data comes with network information, the later can be potentially useful to correct hidden confounding bias. As such, we first formulate a novel problem, counterfactual evaluation of treatment assignment functions with networked observational data. Then, we investigate the following research questions: How can we utilize network information in counterfactual evaluation? Can network information improve the estimates in counterfactual evaluation? Toward answering these questions, first, we propose a novel framework, \emph{Counterfactual Network Evaluator} (CONE), which (1) learns partial representations of latent confounders under the supervision of observed treatments and outcomes; and (2) combines them for counterfactual evaluation. Then through extensive experiments, we corroborate the effectiveness of CONE. The results imply that incorporating network information mitigates hidden confounding bias in counterfactual evaluation.

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arXiv2019

Learning Individual Causal Effects from Networked Observational Data

Convenient access to observational data enables us to learn causal effects without randomized experiments. This research direction draws increasing attention in research areas such as economics, healthcare, and education. For example, we can study how a medicine (the treatment) causally affects the health condition (the outcome) of a patient using existing electronic health records. To validate causal effects learned from observational data, we have to control confounding bias -- the influence of variables which causally influence both the treatment and the outcome. Existing work along this line overwhelmingly relies on the unconfoundedness assumption that there do not exist unobserved confounders. However, this assumption is untestable and can even be untenable. In fact, an important fact ignored by the majority of previous work is that observational data can come with network information that can be utilized to infer hidden confounders. For example, in an observational study of the individual-level treatment effect of a medicine, instead of randomized experiments, the medicine is often assigned to each individual based on a series of factors. Some of the factors (e.g., socioeconomic status) can be challenging to measure and therefore become hidden confounders. Fortunately, the socioeconomic status of an individual can be reflected by whom she is connected in social networks. With this fact in mind, we aim to exploit the network information to recognize patterns of hidden confounders which would further allow us to learn valid individual causal effects from observational data. In this work, we propose a novel causal inference framework, the network deconfounder, which learns representations to unravel patterns of hidden confounders from the network information. Empirically, we perform extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of the network deconfounder on various datasets.

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arXiv2019

Privacy-Aware Recommendation with Private-Attribute Protection using Adversarial Learning

Recommendation is one of the critical applications that helps users find information relevant to their interests. However, a malicious attacker can infer users' private information via recommendations. Prior work obfuscates user-item data before sharing it with recommendation system. This approach does not explicitly address the quality of recommendation while performing data obfuscation. Moreover, it cannot protect users against private-attribute inference attacks based on recommendations. This work is the first attempt to build a Recommendation with Attribute Protection (RAP) model which simultaneously recommends relevant items and counters private-attribute inference attacks. The key idea of our approach is to formulate this problem as an adversarial learning problem with two main components: the private attribute inference attacker, and the Bayesian personalized recommender. The attacker seeks to infer users' private-attribute information according to their items list and recommendations. The recommender aims to extract users' interests while employing the attacker to regularize the recommendation process. Experiments show that the proposed model both preserves the quality of recommendation service and protects users against private-attribute inference attacks.

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arXiv2019

Deep causal representation learning for unsupervised domain adaptation

Studies show that the representations learned by deep neural networks can be transferred to similar prediction tasks in other domains for which we do not have enough labeled data. However, as we transition to higher layers in the model, the representations become more task-specific and less generalizable. Recent research on deep domain adaptation proposed to mitigate this problem by forcing the deep model to learn more transferable feature representations across domains. This is achieved by incorporating domain adaptation methods into deep learning pipeline. The majority of existing models learn the transferable feature representations which are highly correlated with the outcome. However, correlations are not always transferable. In this paper, we propose a novel deep causal representation learning framework for unsupervised domain adaptation, in which we propose to learn domain-invariant causal representations of the input from the source domain. We simulate a virtual target domain using reweighted samples from the source domain and estimate the causal effect of features on the outcomes. The extensive comparative study demonstrates the strengths of the proposed model for unsupervised domain adaptation via causal representations.

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arXiv2019

I Am Not What I Write: Privacy Preserving Text Representation Learning

Online users generate tremendous amounts of textual information by participating in different activities, such as writing reviews and sharing tweets. This textual data provides opportunities for researchers and business partners to study and understand individuals. However, this user-generated textual data not only can reveal the identity of the user but also may contain individual's private information (e.g., age, location, gender). Hence, "you are what you write" as the saying goes. Publishing the textual data thus compromises the privacy of individuals who provided it. The need arises for data publishers to protect people's privacy by anonymizing the data before publishing it. It is challenging to design effective anonymization techniques for textual information which minimizes the chances of re-identification and does not contain users' sensitive information (high privacy) while retaining the semantic meaning of the data for given tasks (high utility). In this paper, we study this problem and propose a novel double privacy preserving text representation learning framework, DPText, which learns a textual representation that (1) is differentially private, (2) does not contain private information and (3) retains high utility for the given task. Evaluating on two natural language processing tasks, i.e., sentiment analysis and part of speech tagging, we show the effectiveness of this approach in terms of preserving both privacy and utility.

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arXiv2019

A Novel Trend Symbolic Aggregate Approximation for Time Series

Symbolic Aggregate approximation (SAX) is a classical symbolic approach in many time series data mining applications. However, SAX only reflects the segment mean value feature and misses important information in a segment, namely the trend of the value change in the segment. Such a miss may cause a wrong classification in some cases, since the SAX representation cannot distinguish different time series with similar average values but different trends. In this paper, we present Trend Feature Symbolic Aggregate approximation (TFSAX) to solve this problem. First, we utilize Piecewise Aggregate Approximation (PAA) approach to reduce dimensionality and discretize the mean value of each segment by SAX. Second, extract trend feature in each segment by using trend distance factor and trend shape factor. Then, design multi-resolution symbolic mapping rules to discretize trend information into symbols. We also propose a modified distance measure by integrating the SAX distance with a weighted trend distance. We show that our distance measure has a tighter lower bound to the Euclidean distance than that of the original SAX. The experimental results on diverse time series data sets demonstrate that our proposed representation significantly outperforms the original SAX representation and an improved SAX representation for classification.

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arXiv2019

Applications of Social Media in Hydroinformatics: A Survey

Floods of research and practical applications employ social media data for a wide range of public applications, including environmental monitoring, water resource managing, disaster and emergency response.Hydroinformatics can benefit from the social media technologies with newly emerged data, techniques and analytical tools to handle large datasets, from which creative ideas and new values could be mined.This paper first proposes a 4W (What, Why, When, hoW) model and a methodological structure to better understand and represent the application of social media to hydroinformatics, then provides an overview of academic research of applying social media to hydroinformatics such as water environment, water resources, flood, drought and water Scarcity management. At last,some advanced topics and suggestions of water related social media applications from data collection, data quality management, fake news detection, privacy issues, algorithms and platforms was present to hydroinformatics managers and researchers based on previous discussion.

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arXiv2019

The Role of User Profile for Fake News Detection

Consuming news from social media is becoming increasingly popular. Social media appeals to users due to its fast dissemination of information, low cost, and easy access. However, social media also enables the widespread of fake news. Because of the detrimental societal effects of fake news, detecting fake news has attracted increasing attention. However, the detection performance only using news contents is generally not satisfactory as fake news is written to mimic true news. Thus, there is a need for an in-depth understanding on the relationship between user profiles on social media and fake news. In this paper, we study the challenging problem of understanding and exploiting user profiles on social media for fake news detection. In an attempt to understand connections between user profiles and fake news, first, we measure users' sharing behaviors on social media and group representative users who are more likely to share fake and real news; then, we perform a comparative analysis of explicit and implicit profile features between these user groups, which reveals their potential to help differentiate fake news from real news. To exploit user profile features, we demonstrate the usefulness of these user profile features in a fake news classification task. We further validate the effectiveness of these features through feature importance analysis. The findings of this work lay the foundation for deeper exploration of user profile features of social media and enhance the capabilities for fake news detection.

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arXiv2019

FakeNewsNet: A Data Repository with News Content, Social Context and Spatialtemporal Information for Studying Fake News on Social Media

Social media has become a popular means for people to consume news. Meanwhile, it also enables the wide dissemination of fake news, i.e., news with intentionally false information, which brings significant negative effects to the society. Thus, fake news detection is attracting increasing attention. However, fake news detection is a non-trivial task, which requires multi-source information such as news content, social context, and dynamic information. First, fake news is written to fool people, which makes it difficult to detect fake news simply based on news contents. In addition to news contents, we need to explore social contexts such as user engagements and social behaviors. For example, a credible user's comment that "this is a fake news" is a strong signal for detecting fake news. Second, dynamic information such as how fake news and true news propagate and how users' opinions toward news pieces are very important for extracting useful patterns for (early) fake news detection and intervention. Thus, comprehensive datasets which contain news content, social context, and dynamic information could facilitate fake news propagation, detection, and mitigation; while to the best of our knowledge, existing datasets only contains one or two aspects. Therefore, in this paper, to facilitate fake news related researches, we provide a fake news data repository FakeNewsNet, which contains two comprehensive datasets that includes news content, social context, and dynamic information. We present a comprehensive description of datasets collection, demonstrate an exploratory analysis of this data repository from different perspectives, and discuss the benefits of FakeNewsNet for potential applications on fake news study on social media.

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arXiv2019

Hierarchical Propagation Networks for Fake News Detection: Investigation and Exploitation

Consuming news from social media is becoming increasingly popular. However, social media also enables the widespread of fake news. Because of its detrimental effects brought by social media, fake news detection has attracted increasing attention. However, the performance of detecting fake news only from news content is generally limited as fake news pieces are written to mimic true news. In the real world, news pieces spread through propagation networks on social media. The news propagation networks usually involve multi-levels. In this paper, we study the challenging problem of investigating and exploiting news hierarchical propagation network on social media for fake news detection. In an attempt to understand the correlations between news propagation networks and fake news, first, we build a hierarchical propagation network from macro-level and micro-level of fake news and true news; second, we perform a comparative analysis of the propagation network features of linguistic, structural and temporal perspectives between fake and real news, which demonstrates the potential of utilizing these features to detect fake news; third, we show the effectiveness of these propagation network features for fake news detection. We further validate the effectiveness of these features from feature important analysis. Altogether, this work presents a data-driven view of hierarchical propagation network and fake news and paves the way towards a healthier online news ecosystem.

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arXiv2019

Variation of a Signal in Schwarzschild Spacetime

In this paper, the variation of a signal in Schwarzschild spacetime is studied and a general equation for frequency shift parameter (FSP) is presented. It shows that FSP depends on the gravitationally-modified Doppler effects and the gravitational effects of observers. In addition, rates of time of a transmitter and a receiver may be different. When FSP is a function of the time of a receiver, FSP contributed by gravitational effect (GFSP) or gravitationally-modified Doppler effect (GMDFSP) may lead a bandlimited signal to a non-bandlimited signal. Based on the equation, FSP as a function of the time of a receiver is calculated for three scenarios: a) a spaceship moves away from a star with a constant velocity communicating with a transmitter at a fixed position; b) a spaceship moves around a star with different conic trajectories communicating with a transmitter at a fixed position; c) a signal is transmitted at a fixed position in a star system to a receiver moving with an elliptical trajectory in another star system. The studied stars are sun-like star, white dwarf and neutron star, and some numerical examples are presented to illustrate the theory.

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arXiv2019

Online Newton Step Algorithm with Estimated Gradient

Online learning with limited information feedback (bandit) tries to solve the problem where an online learner receives partial feedback information from the environment in the course of learning. Under this setting, Flaxman et al.[8] extended Zinkevich's classical Online Gradient Descent (OGD) algorithm [29] by proposing the Online Gradient Descent with Expected Gradient (OGDEG) algorithm. Specifically, it uses a simple trick to approximate the gradient of the loss function $f_t$ by evaluating it at a single point and bounds the expected regret as $\mathcal{O}(T^{5/6})$ [8], where the number of rounds is $T$. Meanwhile, past research efforts have shown that compared with the first-order algorithms, second-order online learning algorithms such as Online Newton Step (ONS) [11] can significantly accelerate the convergence rate of traditional online learning algorithms. Motivated by this, this paper aims to exploit the second-order information to speed up the convergence of the OGDEG algorithm. In particular, we extend the ONS algorithm with the trick of expected gradient and develop a novel second-order online learning algorithm, i.e., Online Newton Step with Expected Gradient (ONSEG). Theoretically, we show that the proposed ONSEG algorithm significantly reduces the expected regret of OGDEG algorithm from $\mathcal{O}(T^{5/6})$ to $\mathcal{O}(T^{2/3})$ in the bandit feedback scenario. Empirically, we further demonstrate the advantages of the proposed algorithm on multiple real-world datasets.

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arXiv2019

Signed Link Prediction with Sparse Data: The Role of Personality Information

Predicting signed links in social networks often faces the problem of signed link data sparsity, i.e., only a small percentage of signed links are given. The problem is exacerbated when the number of negative links is much smaller than that of positive links. Boosting signed link prediction necessitates additional information to compensate for data sparsity. According to psychology theories, one rich source of such information is user's personality such as optimism and pessimism that can help determine her propensity in establishing positive and negative links. In this study, we investigate how personality information can be obtained, and if personality information can help alleviate the data sparsity problem for signed link prediction. We propose a novel signed link prediction model that enables empirical exploration of user personality via social media data. We evaluate our proposed model on two datasets of real-world signed link networks. The results demonstrate the complementary role of personality information in the signed link prediction problem. Experimental results also indicate the effectiveness of different levels of personality information for signed link data sparsity problem.

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