Clique Research Collection

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  • Publication
    ThemeCrowds: Multiresolution Summaries of Twitter Usage
    (University College Dublin. School of Computer Science and Informatics, 2011-06) ; ; ; ;
    Users of social media sites, such as Twitter, rapidly generate large volumes of text content on a daily basis. Visual summaries are needed to understand what groups of people are saying collectively in this unstructured text data. Users will typically discuss a wide variety of topics, where the number of authors talking about a specific topic can quickly grow or diminish over time, and what the collective is saying about the subject can shift as a situation develops. In this paper, we present a technique that summarises what collections of Twitter users are saying about certain topics over time. As the correct resolution for inspecting the data is unknown in advance, the users are clustered hierarchically over a fixed time interval based on the similarity of their posts. The visualisation technique takes this data structure as its input. Given a topic, it finds the correct resolution of users at each time interval and provides tags to summarise what the collective is discussing. The technique is tested on three microblogging corpora, consisting of up to tens of millions of tweets and over a million users. We provide some preliminary user feedback from a research group interested in the area of social media analysis, where this tool could be applied.
      73
  • Publication
    Multiresolution network models
    Many existing statistical and machine learning tools for social network analysis focus on a single level of analysis. Methods designed for clustering optimize a global partition of the graph, whereas projection-based approaches (e.g., the latent space model in the statistics literature) represent in rich detail the roles of individuals. Many pertinent questions in sociology and economics, however, span multiple scales of analysis. Further, many questions involve comparisons across disconnected graphs that will, inevitably be of different sizes, either due to missing data or the inherent heterogeneity in real-world networks. We propose a class of network models that represent network structure on multiple scales and facilitate comparison across graphs with different numbers of individuals. These models differentially invest modeling effort within subgraphs of high density, often termed communities, while maintaining a parsimonious structure between said subgraphs. We show that our model class is projective, highlighting an ongoing discussion in the social network modeling literature on the dependence of inference paradigms on the size of the observed graph. We illustrate the utility of our method using data on household relations from Karnataka, India. Supplementary material for this article is available online.
      570Scopus© Citations 10
  • Publication
    Community detection: effective evaluation on large social networks
    (Oxford University Press, 2014) ;
    While many recently proposed methods aim to detect network communities in large datasets, such as those generated by social media and telecommunications services, most evaluation (i.e. benchmarking) of this research is based on small, hand-curated datasets. We argue that these two types of networks differ so significantly that, by evaluating algorithms solely on the smaller networks, we know little about how well they perform on the larger datasets. Recent work addresses this problem by introducing social network datasets annotated with meta-data that is believed to approximately indicate a 'ground truth' set of network communities. While such efforts are a step in the right direction, we find this meta-data problematic for two reasons. First, in practice, the groups contained in such meta-data may only be a subset of a network’s communities. Second, while it is often reasonable to assume that meta-data is related to network communities in some way, we must be cautious about assuming that these groups correspond closely to network communities. Here, we consider these difficulties and propose an evaluation scheme based on a classification task that is tailored to deal with them.
    Scopus© Citations 19  633
  • Publication
    Joint Modelling of Multiple Network Views
    (Taylor and Francis, 2014-11-17) ;
    Latent space models (LSM) for network data were introduced by Holf et al. (2002) under the basic assumption that each node of the network has an unknown position in a D-dimensional Euclidean latent space: generally the smaller the distance between two nodes in the latent space, the greater their probability of being connected. In this paper we propose a variational inference approach to estimate the intractable posterior of the LSM. In many cases, different network views on the same set of nodes are available. It can therefore be useful to build a model able to jointly summarise the information given by all the network views. For this purpose, we introduce the latent space joint model (LSJM) that merges the information given by multiple network views assuming that the probability of a node being connected with other nodes in each network view is explained by a unique latent variable. This model is demonstrated on the analysis of two datasets: an excerpt of 50 girls from 'Teenage Friends and Lifestyle Study' data at three time points and the Saccharomyces cerevisiae genetic and physical protein-protein interactions.
      409
  • Publication
    Sentiment Analysis of Online Media
    A joint model for annotation bias and document classification is presented in the context of media sentiment analysis. We consider an Irish online media data set comprising online news articles with user annotations of negative, positive or irrelevant impact on the Irish economy. The joint model combines a statistical model for user annotation bias and a Naive Bayes model for the document terms. An EM algorithm is used to estimate the annotation bias model, the unobserved biases in the user annotations, the classifier parameters and the sentiment of the articles. The joint modeling of both the user biases and the classifier is demonstrated to be superior to estimation of the bias followed by the estimation of the classifier parameters.
      633