Tensor Factorization with Label Information for Fake News Detection

The buzz over the so-called "fake news" has created concerns about a degenerated media environment and led to the need for technological solutions. As the detection of fake news is increasingly considered a technological problem, it has attracted considerable research. Most of these studies primarily focus on utilizing information extracted from textual news content. In contrast, we focus on detecting fake news solely based on structural information of social networks. We suggest that the underlying network connections of users that share fake news are discriminative enough to support the detection of fake news. Thereupon, we model each post as a network of friendship interactions and represent a collection of posts as a multidimensional tensor. Taking into account the available labeled data, we propose a tensor factorization method which associates the class labels of data samples with their latent representations. Specifically, we combine a classification error term with the standard factorization in a unified optimization process. Results on real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed method is competitive against state-of-the-art methods by implementing an arguably simpler approach.Comment: Presented at the Workshop on Reducing Online Misinformation Exposure ROME 201

Broad Learning for Healthcare

A broad spectrum of data from different modalities are generated in the healthcare domain every day, including scalar data (e.g., clinical measures collected at hospitals), tensor data (e.g., neuroimages analyzed by research institutes), graph data (e.g., brain connectivity networks), and sequence data (e.g., digital footprints recorded on smart sensors). Capability for modeling information from these heterogeneous data sources is potentially transformative for investigating disease mechanisms and for informing therapeutic interventions. Our works in this thesis attempt to facilitate healthcare applications in the setting of broad learning which focuses on fusing heterogeneous data sources for a variety of synergistic knowledge discovery and machine learning tasks. We are generally interested in computer-aided diagnosis, precision medicine, and mobile health by creating accurate user profiles which include important biomarkers, brain connectivity patterns, and latent representations. In particular, our works involve four different data mining problems with application to the healthcare domain: multi-view feature selection, subgraph pattern mining, brain network embedding, and multi-view sequence prediction.Comment: PhD Thesis, University of Illinois at Chicago, March 201