7,704 research outputs found
Detection of Review Abuse via Semi-Supervised Binary Multi-Target Tensor Decomposition
Product reviews and ratings on e-commerce websites provide customers with
detailed insights about various aspects of the product such as quality,
usefulness, etc. Since they influence customers' buying decisions, product
reviews have become a fertile ground for abuse by sellers (colluding with
reviewers) to promote their own products or to tarnish the reputation of
competitor's products. In this paper, our focus is on detecting such abusive
entities (both sellers and reviewers) by applying tensor decomposition on the
product reviews data. While tensor decomposition is mostly unsupervised, we
formulate our problem as a semi-supervised binary multi-target tensor
decomposition, to take advantage of currently known abusive entities. We
empirically show that our multi-target semi-supervised model achieves higher
precision and recall in detecting abusive entities as compared to unsupervised
techniques. Finally, we show that our proposed stochastic partial natural
gradient inference for our model empirically achieves faster convergence than
stochastic gradient and Online-EM with sufficient statistics.Comment: Accepted to the 25th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and
Data Mining, 2019. Contains supplementary material. arXiv admin note: text
overlap with arXiv:1804.0383
Abnormal Event Detection in Videos using Spatiotemporal Autoencoder
We present an efficient method for detecting anomalies in videos. Recent
applications of convolutional neural networks have shown promises of
convolutional layers for object detection and recognition, especially in
images. However, convolutional neural networks are supervised and require
labels as learning signals. We propose a spatiotemporal architecture for
anomaly detection in videos including crowded scenes. Our architecture includes
two main components, one for spatial feature representation, and one for
learning the temporal evolution of the spatial features. Experimental results
on Avenue, Subway and UCSD benchmarks confirm that the detection accuracy of
our method is comparable to state-of-the-art methods at a considerable speed of
up to 140 fps
RTbust: Exploiting Temporal Patterns for Botnet Detection on Twitter
Within OSNs, many of our supposedly online friends may instead be fake
accounts called social bots, part of large groups that purposely re-share
targeted content. Here, we study retweeting behaviors on Twitter, with the
ultimate goal of detecting retweeting social bots. We collect a dataset of 10M
retweets. We design a novel visualization that we leverage to highlight benign
and malicious patterns of retweeting activity. In this way, we uncover a
'normal' retweeting pattern that is peculiar of human-operated accounts, and 3
suspicious patterns related to bot activities. Then, we propose a bot detection
technique that stems from the previous exploration of retweeting behaviors. Our
technique, called Retweet-Buster (RTbust), leverages unsupervised feature
extraction and clustering. An LSTM autoencoder converts the retweet time series
into compact and informative latent feature vectors, which are then clustered
with a hierarchical density-based algorithm. Accounts belonging to large
clusters characterized by malicious retweeting patterns are labeled as bots.
RTbust obtains excellent detection results, with F1 = 0.87, whereas competitors
achieve F1 < 0.76. Finally, we apply RTbust to a large dataset of retweets,
uncovering 2 previously unknown active botnets with hundreds of accounts
End-to-end anomaly detection in stream data
Nowadays, huge volumes of data are generated with increasing velocity through various systems, applications, and activities. This increases the demand for stream and time series analysis to react to changing conditions in real-time for enhanced efficiency and quality of service delivery as well as upgraded safety and security in private and public sectors. Despite its very rich history, time series anomaly detection is still one of the vital topics in machine learning research and is receiving increasing attention. Identifying hidden patterns and selecting an appropriate model that fits the observed data well and also carries over to unobserved data is not a trivial task. Due to the increasing diversity of data sources and associated stochastic processes, this pivotal data analysis topic is loaded with various challenges like complex latent patterns, concept drift, and overfitting that may mislead the model and cause a high false alarm rate. Handling these challenges leads the advanced anomaly detection methods to develop sophisticated decision logic, which turns them into mysterious and inexplicable black-boxes. Contrary to this trend, end-users expect transparency and verifiability to trust a model and the outcomes it produces. Also, pointing the users to the most anomalous/malicious areas of time series and causal features could save them time, energy, and money. For the mentioned reasons, this thesis is addressing the crucial challenges in an end-to-end pipeline of stream-based anomaly detection through the three essential phases of behavior prediction, inference, and interpretation. The first step is focused on devising a time series model that leads to high average accuracy as well as small error deviation. On this basis, we propose higher-quality anomaly detection and scoring techniques that utilize the related contexts to reclassify the observations and post-pruning the unjustified events. Last but not least, we make the predictive process transparent and verifiable by providing meaningful reasoning behind its generated results based on the understandable concepts by a human. The provided insight can pinpoint the anomalous regions of time series and explain why the current status of a system has been flagged as anomalous. Stream-based anomaly detection research is a principal area of innovation to support our economy, security, and even the safety and health of societies worldwide. We believe our proposed analysis techniques can contribute to building a situational awareness platform and open new perspectives in a variety of domains like cybersecurity, and health
POISED: Spotting Twitter Spam Off the Beaten Paths
Cybercriminals have found in online social networks a propitious medium to
spread spam and malicious content. Existing techniques for detecting spam
include predicting the trustworthiness of accounts and analyzing the content of
these messages. However, advanced attackers can still successfully evade these
defenses.
Online social networks bring people who have personal connections or share
common interests to form communities. In this paper, we first show that users
within a networked community share some topics of interest. Moreover, content
shared on these social network tend to propagate according to the interests of
people. Dissemination paths may emerge where some communities post similar
messages, based on the interests of those communities. Spam and other malicious
content, on the other hand, follow different spreading patterns.
In this paper, we follow this insight and present POISED, a system that
leverages the differences in propagation between benign and malicious messages
on social networks to identify spam and other unwanted content. We test our
system on a dataset of 1.3M tweets collected from 64K users, and we show that
our approach is effective in detecting malicious messages, reaching 91%
precision and 93% recall. We also show that POISED's detection is more
comprehensive than previous systems, by comparing it to three state-of-the-art
spam detection systems that have been proposed by the research community in the
past. POISED significantly outperforms each of these systems. Moreover, through
simulations, we show how POISED is effective in the early detection of spam
messages and how it is resilient against two well-known adversarial machine
learning attacks
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