Related papers: Mining Hidden Populations through Attributed Searc…
In this work we analyze the problem of, given the probability distribution of a population, questioning an unknown individual that is representative of the distribution so that our uncertainty about certain characteristics is significantly…
Respondent-driven sampling is a survey method for hidden or hard-to-reach populations in which sampled individuals recruit others in the study population via their social links. The most popular estimator for for the population mean assumes…
A plethora of problems in AI, engineering and the sciences are naturally formalized as inference in discrete probabilistic models. Exact inference is often prohibitively expensive, as it may require evaluating the (unnormalized) target…
Millions of people express themselves on public social media, such as Twitter. Through their posts, these people may reveal themselves as potentially valuable sources of information. For example, real-time information about an event might…
Diversified recommendation has attracted increasing attention from both researchers and practitioners, which can effectively address the homogeneity of recommended items. Existing approaches predominantly aim to infer the diversity of user…
The recent proliferation of research into transformer based natural language processing has led to a number of studies which attempt to detect the presence of human-like cognitive behavior in the models. We contend that, as is true of human…
Algorithms deployed in education can shape the learning experience and success of a student. It is therefore important to understand whether and how such algorithms might create inequalities or amplify existing biases. In this paper, we…
We analyze dynamic random network models where younger vertices connect to older ones with probabilities proportional to their degrees as well as a propensity kernel governed by their attribute types. Using stochastic approximation…
Social networks are typical attributed networks with node attributes. Different from traditional attribute community detection problem aiming at obtaining the whole set of communities in the network, we study an application-oriented problem…
Crowdsourcing employs human workers to solve computer-hard problems, such as data cleaning, entity resolution, and sentiment analysis. When crowdsourcing tabular data, e.g., the attribute values of an entity set, a worker's answers on the…
A network has a non-overlapping community structure if the nodes of the network can be partitioned into disjoint sets such that each node in a set is densely connected to other nodes inside the set and sparsely connected to the nodes out-…
Thompson sampling has emerged as an effective heuristic for a broad range of online decision problems. In its basic form, the algorithm requires computing and sampling from a posterior distribution over models, which is tractable only for…
In theory, a major advantage to the big data approach in studying online communities is that it should be possible to collect a representative random sample from a broadly defined population. However, in practice, data collection processes…
A hidden database refers to a dataset that an organization makes accessible on the web by allowing users to issue queries through a search interface. In other words, data acquisition from such a source is not by following static…
We propose the Heterogeneous Thurstone Model (HTM) for aggregating ranked data, which can take the accuracy levels of different users into account. By allowing different noise distributions, the proposed HTM model maintains the generality…
The goal of our research is to contribute information about how useful the crowd is at anticipating stereotypes that may be biasing a data set without a researcher's knowledge. The results of the crowd's prediction can potentially be used…
Finding influential users in online social networks is an important problem with many possible useful applications. HITS and other link analysis methods, in particular, have been often used to identify hub and authority users in web graphs…
Even when aggregate accuracy is high, state-of-the-art NLP models often fail systematically on specific subgroups of data, resulting in unfair outcomes and eroding user trust. Additional data collection may not help in addressing these…
Social media data provides propitious opportunities for public health research. However, studies suggest that disparities may exist in the representation of certain populations (e.g., people of lower socioeconomic status). To quantify and…
Incorporating graph side information into recommender systems has been widely used to better predict ratings, but relatively few works have focused on theoretical guarantees. Ahn et al. (2018) firstly characterized the optimal sample…