Faculty Publications

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    A novel sentiment analysis of social networks using supervised learning
    (Springer-Verlag Wien michaela.bolli@springer.at, 2014) Anjaria, M.; Guddeti, R.M.R.
    Online microblog-based social networks have been used for expressing public opinions through short messages. Among popular microblogs, Twitter has attracted the attention of several researchers in areas like predicting the consumer brands, democratic electoral events, movie box office, popularity of celebrities, the stock market, etc. Sentiment analysis over a Twitter-based social network offers a fast and efficient way of monitoring the public sentiment. This paper studies the sentiment prediction task over Twitter using machine-learning techniques, with the consideration of Twitter-specific social network structure such as retweet. We also concentrate on finding both direct and extended terms related to the event and thereby understanding its effect. We employed supervised machine-learning techniques such as support vector machines (SVM), Naive Bayes, maximum entropy and artificial neural networks to classify the Twitter data using unigram, bigram and unigram + bigram (hybrid) feature extraction model for the case study of US Presidential Elections 2012 and Karnataka State Assembly Elections (India) 2013. Further, we combined the results of sentiment analysis with the influence factor generated from the retweet count to improve the prediction accuracy of the task. Experimental results demonstrate that SVM outperforms all other classifiers with maximum accuracy of 88 % in predicting the outcome of US Elections 2012, and 68 % for Indian State Assembly Elections 2013. © 2014, Springer-Verlag Wien.
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    Sharding distributed social databases using social network analysis
    (Springer-Verlag Wien michaela.bolli@springer.at, 2015) Bhat, P.T.; Thankachan, R.V.; Chandrasekaran, K.
    Social networking services support millions of users who interact with one another on a regular basis and generate substantial amounts of data. Due to the inherently distributed structure of such networks and the possible remoteness of the users, the data involved must be partitioned into shards and distributed over a number of servers. One of the most important functionalities of a social networking platform is to process queries related, not only to a given users data but also to the users acquaintances. This suggests that a competent sharding algorithm for a distributed social database must make use of the social network’s topology. We describe algorithms that utilize the structure of social networks to prepare shards that result in better query performance, lower network utilization and better load balancing. © 2015, Springer-Verlag Wien.
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    Social network pruning for building optimal social network: A user perspective
    (Elsevier B.V., 2017) Sumith, N.; Annappa, B.; Bhattacharya, S.
    Social networks with millions of nodes and edges are difficult to visualize and understand. Therefore, approaches to simplify social networks are needed. This paper addresses the problem of pruning social network while not only retaining but also improving its information propagation properties. The paper presents an approach which examines the nodal attribute of a node and develops a criterion to retain a subset of nodes to form a pruned graph of the original social network. To authenticate feasibility of the proposed approach to information propagation process, it is evaluated on small world properties such as average clustering coefficient, diameter, path length, connected components and modularity. The pruned graph, when compared to original social network, shows improvement in small world properties which are essential for information propagation. Results also give a significantly more refined picture of social network, than has been previously highlighted. The efficacy of the pruned graph is demonstrated in the information diffusion process under Independent Cascade (IC) and Linear Threshold (LT) models on various seeding strategies. In all size ranges and across various seeding strategies, the proposed approach performs consistently well in IC model and outperforms other approaches in LT model. Although, the paper discusses the problem with the context of information propagation for viral marketing, the pruned graph generated from the proposed approach is also suitable for any application, where information propagation has to take place reasonably fast and effectively. © 2016 Elsevier B.V.
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    Discovering suspicious behavior in multilayer social networks
    (Elsevier Ltd, 2017) Bindu, P.V.; Santhi Thilagam, P.S.; Ahuja, D.
    Discovering suspicious and illicit behavior in social networks is a significant problem in social network analysis. The patterns of interactions of suspicious users are quite different from their peers and can be identified by using anomaly detection techniques. The existing anomaly detection techniques on social networks focus on networks with only one type of interaction among the users. However, human interactions are inherently multiplex in nature with multiple types of relationships existing among the users, leading to the formation of multilayer social networks. In this paper, we investigate the problem of anomaly detection on multilayer social networks by combining the rich information available in multiple network layers. We propose a pioneer approach namely ADOMS (Anomaly Detection On Multilayer Social networks), an unsupervised, parameter-free, and network feature-based methodology, that automatically detects anomalous users in a multilayer social network and rank them according to their anomalousness. We consider the two well-known anomalous patterns of clique/near-clique and star/near-star anomalies in social networks, and users are ranked according to the degree of similarity of their neighborhoods in different layers to stars or cliques. Experimental results on several real-world multilayer network datasets demonstrate that our approach can effectively detect anomalous nodes in multilayer social networks. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd
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    A novel two-step approach for overlapping community detection in social networks
    (Springer-Verlag Wien michaela.bolli@springer.at, 2017) Sarswat, A.; Jami, V.; Guddeti, G.
    With the rapid increase in popularity of online social networks, community detection in these networks has become a key aspect of research field. Overlapping community detection is an important NP-hard problem of social network analysis. Modularity-based community detection is one of the most widely used approaches for social network analysis. However, modularity-based community detection technique may fail to resolve small-size communities. Hence, we propose a novel two-step approach for overlapping community detection in social networks. In the first step, modularity density-based hybrid meta-heuristics approach is used to find the disjoint communities and the quality of these disjoint communities can be verified using Silhouette coefficient. In the second step, the quality disjoint communities with low computation cost are used to detect overlapping nodes based on Min-Max Ratio of minimum(indegree, outdegree) to the maximum(indegree, outdegree) values of nodes. We tested the proposed algorithm based on 10 standard community quality metrics along with Silhouette score using seven standard datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the current state-of-the-art works in terms of quality and scalability. © 2017, Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria.
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    A holistic approach to influence maximization in social networks: STORIE
    (Elsevier Ltd, 2018) Sumith, N.; Annappa, B.; Bhattacharya, S.
    Crowd sourcing techniques are used in social networks to propagate information at a faster pace through campaigns. One of the challenges of crowd sourcing system is to recruit right users to be a part of successful campaigns. Fetching this right group of people, who influence a vast population to adopt information, is termed as influence maximization. Concerns of scalability and effectiveness need an effective and a viable solution. This paper proposes the solution in three stages. At the first stage, the large social network is pruned based on the nodal properties to make the solution scalable. At the second stage, Outdegree Rank (OR), is proposed and at the third stage, Influence Estimation (IE) approach estimates user influence. This work amalgamates aspects of structure, heuristic and user influence, to form STORIE. The proposed approach is compared to standard heuristics, on various experimental setups such as RNNDp, RNUDp and TVM. The spread of information is observed for HEP, PHY, Twitter, Infectious and YouTube data, under Independent Cascade model and STORIE gives optimal results, with an increase up to 50%. Although the paper discusses influence maximization, the proposed approach is also applicable to understand the spread of epidemics, computer virus, and rumor spreading in the real world and can also be extended to detect anomalies in web and social networks. © 2017 Elsevier B.V.
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    Assessing mobile health applications with twitter analytics
    (Elsevier Ireland Ltd, 2018) Pai, R.R.; Alathur, S.
    Introduction: Advancement in the field of information technology and rise in the use of Internet has changed the lives of people by enabling various services online. In recent times, healthcare sector which faces its service delivery challenges started promoting and using mobile health applications with the intention of cutting down the cost making it accessible and affordable to the people. Objectives: The objective of the study is to perform sentiment analysis using the Twitter data which measures the perception and use of various mobile health applications among the citizens. Methods: The methodology followed in this research is qualitative with the data extracted from a social networking site “Twitter” through a tool RStudio. This tool with the help of Twitter Application Programming Interface requested one thousand tweets each for four different phrases of mobile health applications (apps) such as “fitness app” “diabetes app” “meditation app” and “cancer app”. Depending on the tweets, sentiment analysis was carried out, and its polarity and emotions were measured. Results: Except for cancer app there exists a positive polarity towards the fitness, diabetes, and meditation apps among the users. Following a system thinking approach for our results, this paper also explains the causal relationships between the accessibility and acceptability of mobile health applications which helps the healthcare facility and the application developers in understanding and analyzing the dynamics involved the adopting a new system or modifying an existing one. © 2018 Elsevier B.V.
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    Discovering spammer communities in twitter
    (Springer New York LLC barbara.b.bertram@gsk.com, 2018) Bindu, P.V.; Mishra, R.; Santhi Thilagam, P.S.
    Online social networks have become immensely popular in recent years and have become the major sources for tracking the reverberation of events and news throughout the world. However, the diversity and popularity of online social networks attract malicious users to inject new forms of spam. Spamming is a malicious activity where a fake user spreads unsolicited messages in the form of bulk message, fraudulent review, malware/virus, hate speech, profanity, or advertising for marketing scam. In addition, it is found that spammers usually form a connected community of spam accounts and use them to spread spam to a large set of legitimate users. Consequently, it is highly desirable to detect such spammer communities existing in social networks. Even though a significant amount of work has been done in the field of detecting spam messages and accounts, not much research has been done in detecting spammer communities and hidden spam accounts. In this work, an unsupervised approach called SpamCom is proposed for detecting spammer communities in Twitter. We model the Twitter network as a multilayer social network and exploit the existence of overlapping community-based features of users represented in the form of Hypergraphs to identify spammers based on their structural behavior and URL characteristics. The use of community-based features, graph and URL characteristics of user accounts, and content similarity among users make our technique very robust and efficient. © 2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.
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    Influence maximization in large social networks: Heuristics, models and parameters
    (Elsevier B.V., 2018) Sumith, N.; Annappa, B.; Bhattacharya, S.
    Online social networks play a major role not only in socio psychological front, but also in the economic aspect. The way social network serves as a platform of information spread, has attracted a wide range of applications at its doorstep. In recent years, lot of efforts are directed to use the phenomenon of vast spread of information, via social networks, in various applications, ranging from poll analysis, product marketing, identifying influential users and so on. One such application that has gained research attention is the influence maximization problem. The influence maximization problem aims to fetch the top influential users in the social networks. The aim of the paper is to provide a comprehensive analysis on the state of art approaches towards identifying influential users. In this review, we discuss various challenges and approaches to identify influential users in online social networks. This review concludes with future research direction, helping researchers to bring possible improvements to the existing body of work. © 2018 Elsevier B.V.
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    Influence maximisation in social networks
    (Inderscience Publishers, 2019) Tejaswi, V.; Bindu, P.V.; Santhi Thilagam, P.S.
    Influence maximisation is one of the significant research areas in social network analysis. It helps in identifying influential entities from social networks that can be used in marketing, election campaigns, outbreak detection and so on. Influence maximisation deals with the problem of finding a subset of nodes called seeds in the social network such that these nodes will eventually spread maximum influence in the network. This is an NP-hard problem. The aim of this paper is to provide a complete understanding of the influence maximisation problem. This paper focuses on providing an overview on the influence maximisation problem, and covers three major aspects: 1) different types of inputs required; 2) influence propagation models that map the spread of influence in the network; 3) the approximation algorithms proposed for seed set selection. In addition, we provide the state of the art and describe the open problems in this domain. © 2019 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.