18,638 research outputs found
Fame for sale: efficient detection of fake Twitter followers
are those Twitter accounts specifically created to
inflate the number of followers of a target account. Fake followers are
dangerous for the social platform and beyond, since they may alter concepts
like popularity and influence in the Twittersphere - hence impacting on
economy, politics, and society. In this paper, we contribute along different
dimensions. First, we review some of the most relevant existing features and
rules (proposed by Academia and Media) for anomalous Twitter accounts
detection. Second, we create a baseline dataset of verified human and fake
follower accounts. Such baseline dataset is publicly available to the
scientific community. Then, we exploit the baseline dataset to train a set of
machine-learning classifiers built over the reviewed rules and features. Our
results show that most of the rules proposed by Media provide unsatisfactory
performance in revealing fake followers, while features proposed in the past by
Academia for spam detection provide good results. Building on the most
promising features, we revise the classifiers both in terms of reduction of
overfitting and cost for gathering the data needed to compute the features. The
final result is a novel classifier, general enough to thwart
overfitting, lightweight thanks to the usage of the less costly features, and
still able to correctly classify more than 95% of the accounts of the original
training set. We ultimately perform an information fusion-based sensitivity
analysis, to assess the global sensitivity of each of the features employed by
the classifier. The findings reported in this paper, other than being supported
by a thorough experimental methodology and interesting on their own, also pave
the way for further investigation on the novel issue of fake Twitter followers
Clustering-Based Predictive Process Monitoring
Business process enactment is generally supported by information systems that
record data about process executions, which can be extracted as event logs.
Predictive process monitoring is concerned with exploiting such event logs to
predict how running (uncompleted) cases will unfold up to their completion. In
this paper, we propose a predictive process monitoring framework for estimating
the probability that a given predicate will be fulfilled upon completion of a
running case. The predicate can be, for example, a temporal logic constraint or
a time constraint, or any predicate that can be evaluated over a completed
trace. The framework takes into account both the sequence of events observed in
the current trace, as well as data attributes associated to these events. The
prediction problem is approached in two phases. First, prefixes of previous
traces are clustered according to control flow information. Secondly, a
classifier is built for each cluster using event data to discriminate between
fulfillments and violations. At runtime, a prediction is made on a running case
by mapping it to a cluster and applying the corresponding classifier. The
framework has been implemented in the ProM toolset and validated on a log
pertaining to the treatment of cancer patients in a large hospital
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