BSMA-Gen: A Parallel Synthetic Data Generator for Social Media Timeline Structures

Author(s):  
Chengcheng Yu ◽  
Fan Xia ◽  
Qunyan Zhang ◽  
Haixin Ma ◽  
Weining Qian ◽  
...  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
João Lobo ◽  
Rui Henriques ◽  
Sara C. Madeira

Abstract Background Three-way data started to gain popularity due to their increasing capacity to describe inherently multivariate and temporal events, such as biological responses, social interactions along time, urban dynamics, or complex geophysical phenomena. Triclustering, subspace clustering of three-way data, enables the discovery of patterns corresponding to data subspaces (triclusters) with values correlated across the three dimensions (observations $$\times$$ × features $$\times$$ × contexts). With increasing number of algorithms being proposed, effectively comparing them with state-of-the-art algorithms is paramount. These comparisons are usually performed using real data, without a known ground-truth, thus limiting the assessments. In this context, we propose a synthetic data generator, G-Tric, allowing the creation of synthetic datasets with configurable properties and the possibility to plant triclusters. The generator is prepared to create datasets resembling real 3-way data from biomedical and social data domains, with the additional advantage of further providing the ground truth (triclustering solution) as output. Results G-Tric can replicate real-world datasets and create new ones that match researchers needs across several properties, including data type (numeric or symbolic), dimensions, and background distribution. Users can tune the patterns and structure that characterize the planted triclusters (subspaces) and how they interact (overlapping). Data quality can also be controlled, by defining the amount of missing, noise or errors. Furthermore, a benchmark of datasets resembling real data is made available, together with the corresponding triclustering solutions (planted triclusters) and generating parameters. Conclusions Triclustering evaluation using G-Tric provides the possibility to combine both intrinsic and extrinsic metrics to compare solutions that produce more reliable analyses. A set of predefined datasets, mimicking widely used three-way data and exploring crucial properties was generated and made available, highlighting G-Tric’s potential to advance triclustering state-of-the-art by easing the process of evaluating the quality of new triclustering approaches.


Author(s):  
Shibnath Mukherjee ◽  
Aryya Gangopadhyay ◽  
Zhiyuan Chen

While data mining has been widely acclaimed as a technology that can bring potential benefits to organizations, such efforts may be negatively impacted by the possibility of discovering sensitive patterns, particularly in patient data. In this article the authors present an approach to identify the optimal set of transactions that, if sanitized, would result in hiding sensitive patterns while reducing the accidental hiding of legitimate patterns and the damage done to the database as much as possible. Their methodology allows the user to adjust their preference on the weights assigned to benefits in terms of the number of restrictive patterns hidden, cost in terms of the number of legitimate patterns hidden, and damage to the database in terms of the difference between marginal frequencies of items for the original and sanitized databases. Most approaches in solving the given problem found in literature are all-heuristic based without formal treatment for optimality. While in a few work, ILP has been used previously as a formal optimization approach, the novelty of this method is the extremely low cost-complexity model in contrast to the others. They implement our methodology in C and C++ and ran several experiments with synthetic data generated with the IBM synthetic data generator. The experiments show excellent results when compared to those in the literature.


Author(s):  
Drew Levin ◽  
Patrick Finley

ObjectiveTo develop a spatially accurate biosurveillance synthetic datagenerator for the testing, evaluation, and comparison of new outbreakdetection techniques.IntroductionDevelopment of new methods for the rapid detection of emergingdisease outbreaks is a research priority in the field of biosurveillance.Because real-world data are often proprietary in nature, scientists mustutilize synthetic data generation methods to evaluate new detectionmethodologies. Colizza et. al. have shown that epidemic spread isdependent on the airline transportation network [1], yet current datagenerators do not operate over network structures.Here we present a new spatial data generator that models thespread of contagion across a network of cities connected by airlineroutes. The generator is developed in the R programming languageand produces data compatible with the popular `surveillance’ softwarepackage.MethodsColizza et. al. demonstrate the power-law relationships betweencity population, air traffic, and degree distribution [1]. We generate atransportation network as a Chung-Lu random graph [2] that preservesthese scale-free relationships (Figure 1).First, given a power-law exponent and a desired number of cities,a probability mass function (PMF) is generated that mirrors theexpected degree distribution for the given power-law relationship.Values are then sampled from this PMF to generate an expecteddegree (number of connected cities) for each city in the network.Edges (airline connections) are added to the network probabilisticallyas described in [2]. Unconnected graph components are each joinedto the largest component using linear preferential attachment. Finally,city sizes are calculated based on an observed three-quarter power-law scaling relationship with the sampled degree distribution.Each city is represented as a customizable stochastic compartmentalSIR model. Transportation between cities is modeled similar to [2].An infection is initialized in a single random city and infection countsare recorded in each city for a fixed period of time. A consistentfraction of the modeled infection cases are recorded as daily clinicvisits. These counts are then added onto statically generated baselinedata for each city to produce a full synthetic data set. Alternatively,data sets can be generated using real-world networks, such as the onemaintained by the International Air Transport Association.ResultsDynamics such as the number of cities, degree distribution power-law exponent, traffic flow, and disease kinetics can be customized.In the presented example (Figure 2) the outbreak spreads over a 20city transportation network. Infection spreads rapidly once the morepopulated hub cities are infected. Cities that are multiple flights awayfrom the initially infected city are infected late in the process. Thegenerator is capable of creating data sets of arbitrary size, length, andconnectivity to better mirror a diverse set of observed network types.ConclusionsNew computational methods for outbreak detection andsurveillance must be compared to established approaches. Outbreakmitigation strategies require a realistic model of human transportationbehavior to best evaluate impact. These actions require test data thataccurately reflect the complexity of the real-world data they wouldbe applied to. The outbreak data generated here represents thecomplexity of modern transportation networks and are made to beeasily integrated with established software packages to allow for rapidtesting and deployment.Randomly generated scale-free transportation network with a power-lawdegree exponent ofλ=1.8. City and link sizes are scaled to reflect their weight.An example of observed daily outbreak-related clinic visits across a randomlygenerated network of 20 cities. Each city is colored by the number of flightsrequired to reach the city from the initial infection location. These generatedcounts are then added onto baseline data to create a synthetic data set forexperimentation.KeywordsSimulation; Network; Spatial; Synthetic; Data


Cyber Crime ◽  
2013 ◽  
pp. 325-340
Author(s):  
Shibnath Mukherjee ◽  
Aryya Gangopadhyay ◽  
Zhiyuan Chen

While data mining has been widely acclaimed as a technology that can bring potential benefits to organizations, such efforts may be negatively impacted by the possibility of discovering sensitive patterns, particularly in patient data. In this article the authors present an approach to identify the optimal set of transactions that, if sanitized, would result in hiding sensitive patterns while reducing the accidental hiding of legitimate patterns and the damage done to the database as much as possible. Their methodology allows the user to adjust their preference on the weights assigned to benefits in terms of the number of restrictive patterns hidden, cost in terms of the number of legitimate patterns hidden, and damage to the database in terms of the difference between marginal frequencies of items for the original and sanitized databases. Most approaches in solving the given problem found in literature are all-heuristic based without formal treatment for optimality. While in a few work, ILP has been used previously as a formal optimization approach, the novelty of this method is the extremely low cost-complexity model in contrast to the others. They implement our methodology in C and C++ and ran several experiments with synthetic data generated with the IBM synthetic data generator. The experiments show excellent results when compared to those in the literature.


Author(s):  
Hoon Kim ◽  
Kangwook Lee ◽  
Gyeongjo Hwang ◽  
Changho Suh

Developing a computer vision-based algorithm for identifying dangerous vehicles requires a large amount of labeled accident data, which is difficult to collect in the real world. To tackle this challenge, we first develop a synthetic data generator built on top of a driving simulator. We then observe that the synthetic labels that are generated based on simulation results are very noisy, resulting in poor classification performance. In order to improve the quality of synthetic labels, we propose a new label adaptation technique that first extracts internal states of vehicles from the underlying driving simulator, and then refines labels by predicting future paths of vehicles based on a well-studied motion model. Via real-data experiments, we show that our dangerous vehicle classifier can reduce the missed detection rate by at least 18.5% compared with those trained with real data when time-to-collision is between 1.6s and 1.8s.


2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Miha Moškon

Abstract Background Even though several computational methods for rhythmicity detection and analysis of biological data have been proposed in recent years, classical trigonometric regression based on cosinor still has several advantages over these methods and is still widely used. Different software packages for cosinor-based rhythmometry exist, but lack certain functionalities and require data in different, non-unified input formats. Results We present CosinorPy, a Python implementation of cosinor-based methods for rhythmicity detection and analysis. CosinorPy merges and extends the functionalities of existing cosinor packages. It supports the analysis of rhythmic data using single- or multi-component cosinor models, automatic selection of the best model, population-mean cosinor regression, and differential rhythmicity assessment. Moreover, it implements functions that can be used in a design of experiments, a synthetic data generator, and import and export of data in different formats. Conclusion CosinorPy is an easy-to-use Python package for straightforward detection and analysis of rhythmicity requiring minimal statistical knowledge, and produces publication-ready figures. Its code, examples, and documentation are available to download from https://github.com/mmoskon/CosinorPy. CosinorPy can be installed manually or by using pip, the package manager for Python packages. The implementation reported in this paper corresponds to the software release v1.1.


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