13,167 research outputs found
Causal Inference in Disease Spread across a Heterogeneous Social System
Diffusion processes are governed by external triggers and internal dynamics
in complex systems. Timely and cost-effective control of infectious disease
spread critically relies on uncovering the underlying diffusion mechanisms,
which is challenging due to invisible causality between events and their
time-evolving intensity. We infer causal relationships between infections and
quantify the reflexivity of a meta-population, the level of feedback on event
occurrences by its internal dynamics (likelihood of a regional outbreak
triggered by previous cases). These are enabled by our new proposed model, the
Latent Influence Point Process (LIPP) which models disease spread by
incorporating macro-level internal dynamics of meta-populations based on human
mobility. We analyse 15-year dengue cases in Queensland, Australia. From our
causal inference, outbreaks are more likely driven by statewide global
diffusion over time, leading to complex behavior of disease spread. In terms of
reflexivity, precursory growth and symmetric decline in populous regions is
attributed to slow but persistent feedback on preceding outbreaks via
inter-group dynamics, while abrupt growth but sharp decline in peripheral areas
is led by rapid but inconstant feedback via intra-group dynamics. Our proposed
model reveals probabilistic causal relationships between discrete events based
on intra- and inter-group dynamics and also covers direct and indirect
diffusion processes (contact-based and vector-borne disease transmissions).Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1711.0635
Detecting Flow Anomalies in Distributed Systems
Deep within the networks of distributed systems, one often finds anomalies
that affect their efficiency and performance. These anomalies are difficult to
detect because the distributed systems may not have sufficient sensors to
monitor the flow of traffic within the interconnected nodes of the networks.
Without early detection and making corrections, these anomalies may aggravate
over time and could possibly cause disastrous outcomes in the system in the
unforeseeable future. Using only coarse-grained information from the two end
points of network flows, we propose a network transmission model and a
localization algorithm, to detect the location of anomalies and rank them using
a proposed metric within distributed systems. We evaluate our approach on
passengers' records of an urbanized city's public transportation system and
correlate our findings with passengers' postings on social media microblogs.
Our experiments show that the metric derived using our localization algorithm
gives a better ranking of anomalies as compared to standard deviation measures
from statistical models. Our case studies also demonstrate that transportation
events reported in social media microblogs matches the locations of our detect
anomalies, suggesting that our algorithm performs well in locating the
anomalies within distributed systems
Detecting and Explaining Causes From Text For a Time Series Event
Explaining underlying causes or effects about events is a challenging but
valuable task. We define a novel problem of generating explanations of a time
series event by (1) searching cause and effect relationships of the time series
with textual data and (2) constructing a connecting chain between them to
generate an explanation. To detect causal features from text, we propose a
novel method based on the Granger causality of time series between features
extracted from text such as N-grams, topics, sentiments, and their composition.
The generation of the sequence of causal entities requires a commonsense
causative knowledge base with efficient reasoning. To ensure good
interpretability and appropriate lexical usage we combine symbolic and neural
representations, using a neural reasoning algorithm trained on commonsense
causal tuples to predict the next cause step. Our quantitative and human
analysis show empirical evidence that our method successfully extracts
meaningful causality relationships between time series with textual features
and generates appropriate explanation between them.Comment: Accepted at EMNLP 201
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