11,464 research outputs found
A survey of outlier detection methodologies
Outlier detection has been used for centuries to detect and, where appropriate, remove anomalous observations from data. Outliers arise due to mechanical faults, changes in system behaviour, fraudulent behaviour, human error, instrument error or simply through natural deviations in populations. Their detection can identify system faults and fraud before they escalate with potentially catastrophic consequences. It can identify errors and remove their contaminating effect on the data set and as such to purify the data for processing. The original outlier detection methods were arbitrary but now, principled and systematic techniques are used, drawn from the full gamut of Computer Science and Statistics. In this paper, we introduce a survey of contemporary techniques for outlier detection. We identify their respective motivations and distinguish their advantages and disadvantages in a comparative review
Clustering Memes in Social Media
The increasing pervasiveness of social media creates new opportunities to
study human social behavior, while challenging our capability to analyze their
massive data streams. One of the emerging tasks is to distinguish between
different kinds of activities, for example engineered misinformation campaigns
versus spontaneous communication. Such detection problems require a formal
definition of meme, or unit of information that can spread from person to
person through the social network. Once a meme is identified, supervised
learning methods can be applied to classify different types of communication.
The appropriate granularity of a meme, however, is hardly captured from
existing entities such as tags and keywords. Here we present a framework for
the novel task of detecting memes by clustering messages from large streams of
social data. We evaluate various similarity measures that leverage content,
metadata, network features, and their combinations. We also explore the idea of
pre-clustering on the basis of existing entities. A systematic evaluation is
carried out using a manually curated dataset as ground truth. Our analysis
shows that pre-clustering and a combination of heterogeneous features yield the
best trade-off between number of clusters and their quality, demonstrating that
a simple combination based on pairwise maximization of similarity is as
effective as a non-trivial optimization of parameters. Our approach is fully
automatic, unsupervised, and scalable for real-time detection of memes in
streaming data.Comment: Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances
in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM'13), 201
Transcription Factor-DNA Binding Via Machine Learning Ensembles
We present ensemble methods in a machine learning (ML) framework combining
predictions from five known motif/binding site exploration algorithms. For a
given TF the ensemble starts with position weight matrices (PWM's) for the
motif, collected from the component algorithms. Using dimension reduction, we
identify significant PWM-based subspaces for analysis. Within each subspace a
machine classifier is built for identifying the TF's gene (promoter) targets
(Problem 1). These PWM-based subspaces form an ML-based sequence analysis tool.
Problem 2 (finding binding motifs) is solved by agglomerating k-mer (string)
feature PWM-based subspaces that stand out in identifying gene targets. We
approach Problem 3 (binding sites) with a novel machine learning approach that
uses promoter string features and ML importance scores in a classification
algorithm locating binding sites across the genome. For target gene
identification this method improves performance (measured by the F1 score) by
about 10 percentage points over the (a) motif scanning method and (b) the
coexpression-based association method. Top motif outperformed 5 component
algorithms as well as two other common algorithms (BEST and DEME). For
identifying individual binding sites on a benchmark cross species database
(Tompa et al., 2005) we match the best performer without much human
intervention. It also improved the performance on mammalian TFs.
The ensemble can integrate orthogonal information from different weak
learners (potentially using entirely different types of features) into a
machine learner that can perform consistently better for more TFs. The TF gene
target identification component (problem 1 above) is useful in constructing a
transcriptional regulatory network from known TF-target associations. The
ensemble is easily extendable to include more tools as well as future PWM-based
information.Comment: 33 page
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