1 research outputs found
Joint Inference on Truth/Rumor and Their Sources in Social Networks
In the contemporary era of information explosion, we are often faced with the
mixture of massive \emph{truth} (true information) and \emph{rumor} (false
information) flooded over social networks. Under such circumstances, it is very
essential to infer whether each claim (e.g., news, messages) is a truth or a
rumor, and identify their \emph{sources}, i.e., the users who initially spread
those claims. While most prior arts have been dedicated to the two tasks
respectively, this paper aims to offer the joint inference on truth/rumor and
their sources. Our insight is that a joint inference can enhance the mutual
performance on both sides.
To this end, we propose a framework named SourceCR, which alternates between
two modules, i.e., \emph{credibility-reliability training} for truth/rumor
inference and \emph{division-querying} for source detection, in an iterative
manner. To elaborate, the former module performs a simultaneous estimation of
claim credibility and user reliability by virtue of an Expectation Maximization
algorithm, which takes the source reliability outputted from the latter module
as the initial input. Meanwhile, the latter module divides the network into two
different subnetworks labeled via the claim credibility, and in each subnetwork
launches source detection by applying querying of theoretical budget guarantee
to the users selected via the estimated reliability from the former module. The
proposed SourceCR is provably convergent, and algorithmic implementable with
reasonable computational complexity. We empirically validate the effectiveness
of the proposed framework in both synthetic and real datasets, where the joint
inference leads to an up to 35\% accuracy of credibility gain and 29\% source
detection rate gain compared with the separate counterparts