A Semi-Supervised Learning Approach for Tackling Twitter Spam Drift

Twitter has changed the way people get information by allowing them to express their opinion and comments on the daily tweets. Unfortunately, due to the high popularity of Twitter, it has become very attractive to spammers. Unlike other types of spam, Twitter spam has become a serious issue in the last few years. The large number of users and the high amount of information being shared on Twitter play an important role in accelerating the spread of spam. In order to protect the users, Twitter and the research community have been developing different spam detection systems by applying different machine-learning techniques. However, a recent study showed that the current machine learning-based detection systems are not able to detect spam accurately because spam tweet characteristics vary over time. This issue is called “Twitter Spam Drift”. In this paper, a semi-supervised learning approach (SSLA) has been proposed to tackle this. The new approach uses the unlabeled data to learn the structure of the domain. Different experiments were performed on English and Arabic datasets to test and evaluate the proposed approach and the results show that the proposed SSLA can reduce the effect of Twitter spam drift and outperform the existing techniques

Enhancing navigation in biomedical databases by community voting and database-driven text classification

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The breadth of biological databases and their information content continues to increase exponentially. Unfortunately, our ability to query such sources is still often suboptimal. Here, we introduce and apply community voting, database-driven text classification, and visual aids as a means to incorporate distributed expert knowledge, to automatically classify database entries and to efficiently retrieve them.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Using a previously developed peptide database as an example, we compared several machine learning algorithms in their ability to classify abstracts of published literature results into categories relevant to peptide research, such as related or not related to cancer, angiogenesis, molecular imaging, etc. Ensembles of bagged decision trees met the requirements of our application best. No other algorithm consistently performed better in comparative testing. Moreover, we show that the algorithm produces meaningful class probability estimates, which can be used to visualize the confidence of automatic classification during the retrieval process. To allow viewing long lists of search results enriched by automatic classifications, we added a dynamic heat map to the web interface. We take advantage of community knowledge by enabling users to cast votes in Web 2.0 style in order to correct automated classification errors, which triggers reclassification of all entries. We used a novel framework in which the database "drives" the entire vote aggregation and reclassification process to increase speed while conserving computational resources and keeping the method scalable. In our experiments, we simulate community voting by adding various levels of noise to nearly perfectly labelled instances, and show that, under such conditions, classification can be improved significantly.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Using PepBank as a model database, we show how to build a classification-aided retrieval system that gathers training data from the community, is completely controlled by the database, scales well with concurrent change events, and can be adapted to add text classification capability to other biomedical databases.</p> <p>The system can be accessed at <url>http://pepbank.mgh.harvard.edu</url>.</p

Using weighted nearest neighbor to benefit from unlabeled data

The development of, data-mining applications such as text-classification and molecular profiling has shown the need for machine learning algorithms that can benefit from both labeled and unlabeled data, where often the unlabeled examples greatly outnumber the labeled examples. In this paper we present a two-stage classifier that improves its predictive accuracy by making use of the available unlabeled data. It uses a weighted nearest neighbor classification algorithm using the combined example-sets as a knowledge base. The examples from the unlabeled set are "pre-labeled" by an initial classifier that is build using the limited available training data. By choosing appropriate weights for this prelabeled data, the nearest neighbor classifier consistently improves on the original classifier.status: publishe

Using weighted nearest neighbor to benefit from unlabeled data

The development of data-mining applications such as textclassification and molecular profiling has shown the need for machine learning algorithms that can benefit from both labeled and unlabeled data, where often the unlabeled examples greatly outnumber the labeled examples. In this paper we present a two-stage classifier that improves its predictive accuracy by making use of the available unlabeled data. It uses a weighted nearest neighbor classification algorithm using the combined example-sets as a knowledge base. The examples from the unlabeled set are “pre-labeled” by an initial classifier that is build using the limited available training data. By choosing appropriate weights for this pre-labeled data, the nearest neighbor classifier consistently improves on the original classifier

Using weighted nearest neighbor to benefit from unlabeled data

Abstract. The development of data-mining applications such as textclassification and molecular profiling has shown the need for machine learning algorithms that can benefit from both labeled and unlabeled data, where often the unlabeled examples greatly outnumber the labeled examples. In this paper we present a two-stage classifier that improves its predictive accuracy by making use of the available unlabeled data. It uses a weighted nearest neighbor classification algorithm using the combined example-sets as a knowledge base. The examples from the unlabeled set are “pre-labeled ” by an initial classifier that is build using the limited available training data. By choosing appropriate weights for this prelabeled data, the nearest neighbor classifier consistently improves on the original classifier.

Searching for Needles in the Cosmic Haystack

Searching for pulsar signals in radio astronomy data sets is a difficult task. The data sets are extremely large, approaching the petabyte scale, and are growing larger as instruments become more advanced. Big Data brings with it big challenges. Processing the data to identify candidate pulsar signals is computationally expensive and must utilize parallelism to be scalable. Labeling benchmarks for supervised classification is costly. To compound the problem, pulsar signals are very rare, e.g., only 0.05% of the instances in one data set represent pulsars. Furthermore, there are many different approaches to candidate classification with no consensus on a best practice. This dissertation is focused on identifying and classifying radio pulsar candidates from single pulse searches. First, to identify and classify Dispersed Pulse Groups (DPGs), we developed a supervised machine learning approach that consists of RAPID (a novel peak identification algorithm), feature extraction, and supervised machine learning classification. We tested six algorithms for classification with four imbalance treatments. Results showed that classifiers with imbalance treatments had higher recall values. Overall, classifiers using multiclass RandomForests combined with Synthetic Majority Oversampling TEchnique (SMOTE) were the most efficient; they identified additional known pulsars not in the benchmark, with less false positives than other classifiers. Second, we developed a parallel single pulse identification method, D-RAPID, and introduced a novel automated multiclass labeling (ALM) technique that we combined with feature selection to improve execution performance. D-RAPID improved execution performance over RAPID by a factor of 5. We also showed that the combination of ALM and feature selection sped up the execution performance of RandomForest by 54% on average with less than a 2% average reduction in classification performance. Finally, we proposed CoDRIFt, a novel classification algorithm that is distributed for scalability and employs semi-supervised learning to leverage unlabeled data to inform classification. We evaluated and compared CoDRIFt to eleven other classifiers. The results showed that CoDRIFt excelled at classifying candidates in imbalanced benchmarks with a majority of non-pulsar signals (\u3e95%). Furthermore, CoDRIFt models created with very limited sets of labeled data (as few as 22 labeled minority class instances) were able to achieve high recall (mean = 0.98). In comparison to the other algorithms trained on similar sets, CoDRIFt outperformed them all, with recall 2.9% higher than the next best classifier and a 35% average improvement over all eleven classifiers. CoDRIFt is customizable for other problem domains with very large, imbalanced data sets, such as fraud detection and cyber attack detection