arXiv subjects

John C. S. Lui

Publications and source records attributed to John C. S. Lui.

At least 127 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

arXiv2016

Quegel: A General-Purpose Query-Centric Framework for Querying Big Graphs

Pioneered by Google's Pregel, many distributed systems have been developed for large-scale graph analytics. These systems expose the user-friendly "think like a vertex" programming interface to users, and exhibit good horizontal scalability. However, these systems are designed for tasks where the majority of graph vertices participate in computation, but are not suitable for processing light-workload graph queries where only a small fraction of vertices need to be accessed. The programming paradigm adopted by these systems can seriously under-utilize the resources in a cluster for graph query processing. In this work, we develop a new open-source system, called Quegel, for querying big graphs, which treats queries as first-class citizens in the design of its computing model. Users only need to specify the Pregel-like algorithm for a generic query, and Quegel processes light-workload graph queries on demand using a novel superstep-sharing execution model to effectively utilize the cluster resources. Quegel further provides a convenient interface for constructing graph indexes, which significantly improve query performance but are not supported by existing graph-parallel systems. Our experiments verified that Quegel is highly efficient in answering various types of graph queries and is up to orders of magnitude faster than existing systems.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2015

Tracking Triadic Cardinality Distributions for Burst Detection in Social Activity Streams

In everyday life, we often observe unusually frequent interactions among people before or during important events, e.g., we receive/send more greetings from/to our friends on Christmas Day, than usual. We also observe that some videos suddenly go viral through people's sharing in online social networks (OSNs). Do these seemingly different phenomena share a common structure? All these phenomena are associated with sudden surges of user activities in networks, which we call "bursts" in this work. We find that the emergence of a burst is accompanied with the formation of triangles in networks. This finding motivates us to propose a new method to detect bursts in OSNs. We first introduce a new measure, "triadic cardinality distribution", corresponding to the fractions of nodes with different numbers of triangles, i.e., triadic cardinalities, within a network. We demonstrate that this distribution changes when a burst occurs, and is naturally immunized against spamming social-bot attacks. Hence, by tracking triadic cardinality distributions, we can reliably detect bursts in OSNs. To avoid handling massive activity data generated by OSN users, we design an efficient sample-estimate solution to estimate the triadic cardinality distribution from sampled data. Extensive experiments conducted on real data demonstrate the usefulness of this triadic cardinality distribution and the effectiveness of our sample-estimate solution.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2015

Minfer: Inferring Motif Statistics From Sampled Edges

Characterizing motif (i.e., locally connected subgraph patterns) statistics is important for understanding complex networks such as online social networks and communication networks. Previous work made the strong assumption that the graph topology of interest is known, and that the dataset either fits into main memory or stored on disks such that it is not expensive to obtain all neighbors of any given node. In practice, researchers have to deal with the situation where the graph topology is unknown, either because the graph is dynamic, or because it is expensive to collect and store all topological and meta information on disk. Hence, what is available to researchers is only a snapshot of the graph generated by sampling edges from the graph at random, which we called a "RESampled graph". Clearly, a RESampled graph's motif statistics may be quite different from the underlying original graph. To solve this challenge, we propose a framework and implement a system called Minfer, which can take the given RESampled graph and accurately infer the underlying graph's motif statistics. We also use Fisher information to bound the error of our estimates. Experiments using large scale datasets show that our method to be accurate.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2015

Mathematical Modeling of Insurance Mechanisms for E-commerce Systems

Electronic commerce (a.k.a. E-commerce) systems such as eBay and Taobao of Alibaba are becoming increasingly popular. Having an effective reputation system is critical to this type of internet service because it can assist buyers to evaluate the trustworthiness of sellers, and it can also improve the revenue for reputable sellers and E-commerce operators. We formulate a stochastic model to analyze an eBay-like reputation system and propose four measures to quantify its effectiveness: (1) new seller ramp up time, (2) new seller drop out probability, (3) long term profit gains for sellers, and (4) average per seller transaction gains for the E-commerce operator. Through our analysis, we identify key factors which influence these four measures. We propose a new insurance mechanism which consists of an insurance protocol and a transaction mechanism to improve the above four measures. We show that our insurance mechanism can reduce the ramp up time by around 87.2%, and guarantee new sellers ramp up before the deadline $T_w$ with a high probability (close to 1.0). It also increases the long term profit gains and average per seller transaction gains by at least 95.3%.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2014

Algorithmic Design for Competitive Influence Maximization Problems

Given the popularity of the viral marketing campaign in online social networks, finding an effective method to identify a set of most influential nodes so to compete well with other viral marketing competitors is of upmost importance. We propose a "General Competitive Independent Cascade (GCIC)" model to describe the general influence propagation of two competing sources in the same network. We formulate the "Competitive Influence Maximization (CIM)" problem as follows: Under a prespecified influence propagation model and that the competitor's seed set is known, how to find a seed set of $k$ nodes so as to trigger the largest influence cascade? We propose a general algorithmic framework TCIM for the CIM problem under the GCIC model. TCIM returns a $(1-1/e-ε)$-approximate solution with probability at least $1-n^{-\ell}$, and has an efficient time complexity of $O(c(k+\ell)(m+n)\log n/ε^2)$, where $c$ depends on specific propagation model and may also depend on $k$ and underlying network $G$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first general algorithmic framework that has both $(1-1/e-ε)$ performance guarantee and practical efficiency. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets under three specific influence propagation models, and show the efficiency and accuracy of our framework. In particular, we achieve up to four orders of magnitude speedup as compared to the previous state-of-the-art algorithms with the approximate guarantee.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2014

Friends or Foes: Distributed and Randomized Algorithms to Determine Dishonest Recommenders in Online Social Networks

Viral marketing is becoming important due to the popularity of online social networks (OSNs). Companies may provide incentives (e.g., via free samples of a product) to a small group of users in an OSN, and these users provide recommendations to their friends, which eventually increases the overall sales of a given product. Nevertheless, this also opens a door for "malicious behaviors": dishonest users may intentionally give misleading recommendations to their friends so as to distort the normal sales distribution. In this paper, we propose a detection framework to identify dishonest users in OSNs. In particular, we present a set of fully distributed and randomized algorithms, and also quantify the performance of the algorithms by deriving probability of false positive, probability of false negative, and the distribution of number of detection rounds. Extensive simulations are also carried out to illustrate the impact of misleading recommendations and the effectiveness of our detection algorithms. The methodology we present here will enhance the security level of viral marketing in OSNs.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2014

Block-Structured Supermarket Models

Supermarket models are a class of parallel queueing networks with an adaptive control scheme that play a key role in the study of resource management of, such as, computer networks, manufacturing systems and transportation networks. When the arrival processes are non-Poisson and the service times are non-exponential, analysis of such a supermarket model is always limited, interesting, and challenging. This paper describes a supermarket model with non-Poisson inputs: Markovian Arrival Processes (MAPs) and with non-exponential service times: Phase-type (PH) distributions, and provides a generalized matrix-analytic method which is first combined with the operator semigroup and the mean-field limit. When discussing such a more general supermarket model, this paper makes some new results and advances as follows: (1) Providing a detailed probability analysis for setting up an infinite-dimensional system of differential vector equations satisfied by the expected fraction vector, where "the invariance of environment factors" is given as an important result. (2) Introducing the phase-type structure to the operator semigroup and to the mean-field limit, and a Lipschitz condition can be obtained by means of a unified matrix-differential algorithm. (3) The matrix-analytic method is used to compute the fixed point which leads to performance computation of this system. Finally, we use some numerical examples to illustrate how the performance measures of this supermarket model depend on the non-Poisson inputs and on the non-exponential service times. Thus the results of this paper give new highlight on understanding influence of non-Poisson inputs and of non-exponential service times on performance measures of more general supermarket models.

cs.PF↗

arXiv2014

Design of Efficient Sampling Methods on Hybrid Social-Affiliation Networks

Graph sampling via crawling has become increasingly popular and important in the study of measuring various characteristics of large scale complex networks. While powerful, it is known to be challenging when the graph is loosely connected or disconnected which slows down the convergence of random walks and can cause poor estimation accuracy. In this work, we observe that the graph under study, or called target graph, usually does not exist in isolation. In many situations, the target graph is related to an auxiliary graph and an affiliation graph, and the target graph becomes well connected when we view it from the perspective of these three graphs together, or called a hybrid social-affiliation graph in this paper. When directly sampling the target graph is difficult or inefficient, we can indirectly sample it efficiently with the assistances of the other two graphs. We design three sampling methods on such a hybrid social-affiliation network. Experiments conducted on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2014

Efficiently Estimating Motif Statistics of Large Networks

Exploring statistics of locally connected subgraph patterns (also known as network motifs) has helped researchers better understand the structure and function of biological and online social networks (OSNs). Nowadays the massive size of some critical networks -- often stored in already overloaded relational databases -- effectively limits the rate at which nodes and edges can be explored, making it a challenge to accurately discover subgraph statistics. In this work, we propose sampling methods to accurately estimate subgraph statistics from as few queried nodes as possible. We present sampling algorithms that efficiently and accurately estimate subgraph properties of massive networks. Our algorithms require no pre-computation or complete network topology information. At the same time, we provide theoretical guarantees of convergence. We perform experiments using widely known data sets, and show that for the same accuracy, our algorithms require an order of magnitude less queries (samples) than the current state-of-the-art algorithms.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2014

The Chaos of Propagation in a Retrial Supermarket Model

When decomposing the total orbit into $N$ sub-orbits (or simply orbits) related to each of $N$ servers and through comparing the numbers of customers in these orbits, we introduce a retrial supermarket model of $N$ identical servers, where two probing-server choice numbers are respectively designed for dynamically allocating each primary arrival and each retrial arrival into these orbits when the chosen servers are all busy. Note that the designed purpose of the two choice numbers can effectively improve performance measures of this retrial supermarket model. This paper analyzes a simple and basic retrial supermarket model of N identical servers, that is, Poisson arrivals, exponential service and retrial times. To this end, we first provide a detailed probability computation to set up an infinite-dimensional system of differential equations (or mean-field equations) satisfied by the expected fraction vector. Then, as N goes to infinity, we apply the operator semigroup to obtaining the mean-field limit (or chaos of propagation) for the sequence of Markov processes which express the state of this retrial supermarket model. Specifically, some simple and basic conditions for the mean-field limit as well as for the Lipschitz condition are established through the first two moments of the queue length in any orbit. Finally, we show that the fixed point satisfies a system of nonlinear equations which is an interesting networking generalization of the tail equations given in the M/M/1 retrial queue, and also use the fixed point to give performance analysis of this retrial supermarket model through numerical computation.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2013

Social Sensor Placement in Large Scale Networks: A Graph Sampling Perspective

Sensor placement for the purpose of detecting/tracking news outbreak and preventing rumor spreading is a challenging problem in a large scale online social network (OSN). This problem is a kind of subset selection problem: choosing a small set of items from a large population so to maximize some prespecified set function. However, it is known to be NP-complete. Existing heuristics are very costly especially for modern OSNs which usually contain hundreds of millions of users. This paper aims to design methods to find \emph{good solutions} that can well trade off efficiency and accuracy. We first show that it is possible to obtain a high quality solution with a probabilistic guarantee from a "{\em candidate set}" of the underlying social network. By exploring this candidate set, one can increase the efficiency of placing social sensors. We also present how this candidate set can be obtained using "{\em graph sampling}", which has an advantage over previous methods of not requiring the prior knowledge of the complete network topology. Experiments carried out on two real datasets demonstrate not only the accuracy and efficiency of our approach, but also effectiveness in detecting and predicting news outbreak.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2013

Practical Characterization of Large Networks Using Neighborhood Information

Characterizing large online social networks (OSNs) through node querying is a challenging task. OSNs often impose severe constraints on the query rate, hence limiting the sample size to a small fraction of the total network. Various ad-hoc subgraph sampling methods have been proposed, but many of them give biased estimates and no theoretical basis on the accuracy. In this work, we focus on developing sampling methods for OSNs where querying a node also reveals partial structural information about its neighbors. Our methods are optimized for NoSQL graph databases (if the database can be accessed directly), or utilize Web API available on most major OSNs for graph sampling. We show that our sampling method has provable convergence guarantees on being an unbiased estimator, and it is more accurate than current state-of-the-art methods. We characterize metrics such as node label density estimation and edge label density estimation, two of the most fundamental network characteristics from which other network characteristics can be derived. We evaluate our methods on-the-fly over several live networks using their native APIs. Our simulation studies over a variety of offline datasets show that by including neighborhood information, our method drastically (4-fold) reduces the number of samples required to achieve the same estimation accuracy of state-of-the-art methods.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2013

Sampling Content Distributed Over Graphs

Despite recent effort to estimate topology characteristics of large graphs (i.e., online social networks and peer-to-peer networks), little attention has been given to develop a formal methodology to characterize the vast amount of content distributed over these networks. Due to the large scale nature of these networks, exhaustive enumeration of this content is computationally prohibitive. In this paper, we show how one can obtain content properties by sampling only a small fraction of vertices. We first show that when sampling is naively applied, this can produce a huge bias in content statistics (i.e., average number of content duplications). To remove this bias, one may use maximum likelihood estimation to estimate content characteristics. However our experimental results show that one needs to sample most vertices in the graph to obtain accurate statistics using such a method. To address this challenge, we propose two efficient estimators: special copy estimator (SCE) and weighted copy estimator (WCE) to measure content characteristics using available information in sampled contents. SCE uses the special content copy indicator to compute the estimate, while WCE derives the estimate based on meta-information in sampled vertices. We perform experiments to show WCE and SCE are cost effective and also ``{\em asymptotically unbiased}''. Our methodology provides a new tool for researchers to efficiently query content distributed in large scale networks.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2013

DroidAnalytics: A Signature Based Analytic System to Collect, Extract, Analyze and Associate Android Malware

Smartphones and mobile devices are rapidly becoming indispensable devices for many users. Unfortunately, they also become fertile grounds for hackers to deploy malware and to spread virus. There is an urgent need to have a "security analytic & forensic system" which can facilitate analysts to examine, dissect, associate and correlate large number of mobile applications. An effective analytic system needs to address the following questions: How to automatically collect and manage a high volume of mobile malware? How to analyze a zero-day suspicious application, and compare or associate it with existing malware families in the database? How to perform information retrieval so to reveal similar malicious logic with existing malware, and to quickly identify the new malicious code segment? In this paper, we present the design and implementation of DroidAnalytics, a signature based analytic system to automatically collect, manage, analyze and extract android malware. The system facilitates analysts to retrieve, associate and reveal malicious logics at the "opcode level". We demonstrate the efficacy of DroidAnalytics using 150,368 Android applications, and successfully determine 2,494 Android malware from 102 different families, with 342 of them being zero-day malware samples from six different families. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first reported case in showing such a large Android malware analysis/detection. The evaluation shows the DroidAnalytics is a valuable tool and is effective in analyzing malware repackaging and mutations.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2013

Mathematical Modeling of Product Rating: Sufficiency, Misbehavior and Aggregation Rules

Many web services like eBay, Tripadvisor, Epinions, etc, provide historical product ratings so that users can evaluate the quality of products. Product ratings are important since they affect how well a product will be adopted by the market. The challenge is that we only have {\em "partial information"} on these ratings: Each user provides ratings to only a "{\em small subset of products}". Under this partial information setting, we explore a number of fundamental questions: What is the "{\em minimum number of ratings}" a product needs so one can make a reliable evaluation of its quality? How users' {\em misbehavior} (such as {\em cheating}) in product rating may affect the evaluation result? To answer these questions, we present a formal mathematical model of product evaluation based on partial information. We derive theoretical bounds on the minimum number of ratings needed to produce a reliable indicator of a product's quality. We also extend our model to accommodate users' misbehavior in product rating. We carry out experiments using both synthetic and real-world data (from TripAdvisor, Amazon and eBay) to validate our model, and also show that using the "majority rating rule" to aggregate product ratings, it produces more reliable and robust product evaluation results than the "average rating rule".

cs.IR↗

arXiv2013

Stochastic Analysis on RAID Reliability for Solid-State Drives

Solid-state drives (SSDs) have been widely deployed in desktops and data centers. However, SSDs suffer from bit errors, and the bit error rate is time dependent since it increases as an SSD wears down. Traditional storage systems mainly use parity-based RAID to provide reliability guarantees by striping redundancy across multiple devices, but the effectiveness of RAID in SSDs remains debatable as parity updates aggravate the wearing and bit error rates of SSDs. In particular, an open problem is that how different parity distributions over multiple devices, such as the even distribution suggested by conventional wisdom, or uneven distributions proposed in recent RAID schemes for SSDs, may influence the reliability of an SSD RAID array. To address this fundamental problem, we propose the first analytical model to quantify the reliability dynamics of an SSD RAID array. Specifically, we develop a "non-homogeneous" continuous time Markov chain model, and derive the transient reliability solution. We validate our model via trace-driven simulations and conduct numerical analysis to provide insights into the reliability dynamics of SSD RAID arrays under different parity distributions and subject to different bit error rates and array configurations. Designers can use our model to decide the appropriate parity distribution based on their reliability requirements.

cs.PF↗

arXiv2013

Stochastic Modeling of Large-Scale Solid-State Storage Systems: Analysis, Design Tradeoffs and Optimization

Solid state drives (SSDs) have seen wide deployment in mobiles, desktops, and data centers due to their high I/O performance and low energy consumption. As SSDs write data out-of-place, garbage collection (GC) is required to erase and reclaim space with invalid data. However, GC poses additional writes that hinder the I/O performance, while SSD blocks can only endure a finite number of erasures. Thus, there is a performance-durability tradeoff on the design space of GC. To characterize the optimal tradeoff, this paper formulates an analytical model that explores the full optimal design space of any GC algorithm. We first present a stochastic Markov chain model that captures the I/O dynamics of large-scale SSDs, and adapt the mean-field approach to derive the asymptotic steady-state performance. We further prove the model convergence and generalize the model for all types of workload. Inspired by this model, we propose a randomized greedy algorithm (RGA) that can operate along the optimal tradeoff curve with a tunable parameter. Using trace-driven simulation on DiskSim with SSD add-ons, we demonstrate how RGA can be parameterized to realize the performance-durability tradeoff.

cs.PF↗

arXiv2012

On the Evolution of the Internet Economic Ecosystem

The evolution of the Internet has manifested itself in many ways: the traffic characteristics, the interconnection topologies and the business relationships among the autonomous components. It is important to understand why (and how) this evolution came about, and how the interplay of these dynamics may affect future evolution and services. We propose a network aware, macroscopic model that captures the characteristics and interactions of the application and network providers, and show how it leads to a market equilibrium of the ecosystem. By analyzing the driving forces and the dynamics of the market equilibrium, we obtain some fundamental understandings of the cause and effect of the Internet evolution, which explain why some historical and recent evolutions have happened. Furthermore, by projecting the likely future evolutions, our model can help application and network providers to make informed business decisions so as to succeed in this competitive ecosystem.

cs.NI↗