7,939 research outputs found
Training deep neural density estimators to identify mechanistic models of neural dynamics
Mechanistic modeling in neuroscience aims to explain observed phenomena in terms of underlying causes. However, determining which model parameters agree with complex and stochastic neural data presents a significant challenge. We address this challenge with a machine learning tool which uses deep neural density estimators-- trained using model simulations-- to carry out Bayesian inference and retrieve the full space of parameters compatible with raw data or selected data features. Our method is scalable in parameters and data features, and can rapidly analyze new data after initial training. We demonstrate the power and flexibility of our approach on receptive fields, ion channels, and Hodgkin-Huxley models. We also characterize the space of circuit configurations giving rise to rhythmic activity in the crustacean stomatogastric ganglion, and use these results to derive hypotheses for underlying compensation mechanisms. Our approach will help close the gap between data-driven and theory-driven models of neural dynamics
SybilBelief: A Semi-supervised Learning Approach for Structure-based Sybil Detection
Sybil attacks are a fundamental threat to the security of distributed
systems. Recently, there has been a growing interest in leveraging social
networks to mitigate Sybil attacks. However, the existing approaches suffer
from one or more drawbacks, including bootstrapping from either only known
benign or known Sybil nodes, failing to tolerate noise in their prior knowledge
about known benign or Sybil nodes, and being not scalable.
In this work, we aim to overcome these drawbacks. Towards this goal, we
introduce SybilBelief, a semi-supervised learning framework, to detect Sybil
nodes. SybilBelief takes a social network of the nodes in the system, a small
set of known benign nodes, and, optionally, a small set of known Sybils as
input. Then SybilBelief propagates the label information from the known benign
and/or Sybil nodes to the remaining nodes in the system.
We evaluate SybilBelief using both synthetic and real world social network
topologies. We show that SybilBelief is able to accurately identify Sybil nodes
with low false positive rates and low false negative rates. SybilBelief is
resilient to noise in our prior knowledge about known benign and Sybil nodes.
Moreover, SybilBelief performs orders of magnitudes better than existing Sybil
classification mechanisms and significantly better than existing Sybil ranking
mechanisms.Comment: 12 page
People on Drugs: Credibility of User Statements in Health Communities
Online health communities are a valuable source of information for patients
and physicians. However, such user-generated resources are often plagued by
inaccuracies and misinformation. In this work we propose a method for
automatically establishing the credibility of user-generated medical statements
and the trustworthiness of their authors by exploiting linguistic cues and
distant supervision from expert sources. To this end we introduce a
probabilistic graphical model that jointly learns user trustworthiness,
statement credibility, and language objectivity. We apply this methodology to
the task of extracting rare or unknown side-effects of medical drugs --- this
being one of the problems where large scale non-expert data has the potential
to complement expert medical knowledge. We show that our method can reliably
extract side-effects and filter out false statements, while identifying
trustworthy users that are likely to contribute valuable medical information
The Role of Peer Influence in Churn in Wireless Networks
Subscriber churn remains a top challenge for wireless carriers. These
carriers need to understand the determinants of churn to confidently apply
effective retention strategies to ensure their profitability and growth. In
this paper, we look at the effect of peer influence on churn and we try to
disentangle it from other effects that drive simultaneous churn across friends
but that do not relate to peer influence. We analyze a random sample of roughly
10 thousand subscribers from large dataset from a major wireless carrier over a
period of 10 months. We apply survival models and generalized propensity score
to identify the role of peer influence. We show that the propensity to churn
increases when friends do and that it increases more when many strong friends
churn. Therefore, our results suggest that churn managers should consider
strategies aimed at preventing group churn. We also show that survival models
fail to disentangle homophily from peer influence over-estimating the effect of
peer influence.Comment: Accepted in Seventh ASE International Conference on Social Computing
(Socialcom 2014), Best Paper Award Winne
Security, trust and cooperation in wireless sensor networks
Wireless sensor networks are a promising technology for many real-world applications such as critical infrastructure monitoring, scientific data gathering, smart buildings, etc.. However, given the typically unattended and potentially unsecured operation environment, there has been an increased number of security threats to sensor networks. In addition, sensor networks have very constrained resources, such as limited energy, memory, computational power, and communication bandwidth. These unique challenges call for new security mechanisms and algorithms. In this dissertation, we propose novel algorithms and models to address some important and challenging security problems in wireless sensor networks.
The first part of the dissertation focuses on data trust in sensor networks. Since sensor networks are mainly deployed to monitor events and report data, the quality of received data must be ensured in order to make meaningful inferences from sensor data. We first study a false data injection attack in the distributed state estimation problem and propose a distributed Bayesian detection algorithm, which could maintain correct estimation results when less than one half of the sensors are compromised. To deal with the situation where more than one half of the sensors may be compromised, we introduce a special class of sensor nodes called \textit{trusted cores}. We then design a secure distributed trust aggregation algorithm that can utilize the trusted cores to improve network robustness. We show that as long as there exist some paths that can connect each regular node to one of these trusted cores, the network can not be subverted by attackers.
The second part of the dissertation focuses on sensor network monitoring and anomaly detection. A sensor network may suffer from system failures due to loss of links and nodes, or malicious intrusions. Therefore, it is critical to continuously monitor the overall state of the network and locate performance anomalies. The network monitoring and probe selection problem is formulated as a budgeted coverage problem and a Markov decision process. Efficient probing strategies are designed to achieve a flexible tradeoff between inference accuracy and probing overhead. Based on the probing results on traffic measurements, anomaly detection can be conducted. To capture the highly dynamic network traffic, we develop a detection scheme based on multi-scale analysis of the traffic using wavelet transforms and hidden Markov models. The performance of the probing strategy and of the detection scheme are extensively evaluated in malicious scenarios using the NS-2 network simulator.
Lastly, to better understand the role of trust in sensor networks, a game theoretic model is formulated to mathematically analyze the relation between trust and cooperation. Given the trust relations, the interactions among nodes are modeled as a network game on a trust-weighted graph. We then propose an efficient heuristic method that explores network heterogeneity to improve Nash equilibrium efficiency
Modeling Complex Networks For (Electronic) Commerce
NYU, Stern School of Business, IOMS Department, Center for Digital Economy Researc
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