Checkovid: A COVID-19 misinformation detection system on Twitter using network and content mining perspectives

During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media platforms were ideal for communicating due to social isolation and quarantine. Also, it was the primary source of misinformation dissemination on a large scale, referred to as the infodemic. Therefore, automatic debunking misinformation is a crucial problem. To tackle this problem, we present two COVID-19 related misinformation datasets on Twitter and propose a misinformation detection system comprising network-based and content-based processes based on machine learning algorithms and NLP techniques. In the network-based process, we focus on social properties, network characteristics, and users. On the other hand, we classify misinformation using the content of the tweets directly in the content-based process, which contains text classification models (paragraph-level and sentence-level) and similarity models. The evaluation results on the network-based process show the best results for the artificial neural network model with an F1 score of 88.68%. In the content-based process, our novel similarity models, which obtained an F1 score of 90.26%, show an improvement in the misinformation classification results compared to the network-based models. In addition, in the text classification models, the best result was achieved using the stacking ensemble-learning model by obtaining an F1 score of 95.18%. Furthermore, we test our content-based models on the Constraint@AAAI2021 dataset, and by getting an F1 score of 94.38%, we improve the baseline results. Finally, we develop a fact-checking website called Checkovid that uses each process to detect misinformative and informative claims in the domain of COVID-19 from different perspectives.

Low-rank Dictionary Learning for Unsupervised Feature Selection

There exist many high-dimensional data in real-world applications such as biology, computer vision, and social networks. Feature selection approaches are devised to confront with high-dimensional data challenges with the aim of efficient learning technologies as well as reduction of models complexity. Due to the hardship of labeling on these datasets, there are a variety of approaches on feature selection process in an unsupervised setting by considering some important characteristics of data. In this paper, we introduce a novel unsupervised feature selection approach by applying dictionary learning ideas in a low-rank representation. Dictionary learning in a low-rank representation not only enables us to provide a new representation, but it also maintains feature correlation. Then, spectral analysis is employed to preserve sample similarities. Finally, a unified objective function for unsupervised feature selection is proposed in a sparse way by an $\ell_{2,1}$-norm regularization. Furthermore, an efficient numerical algorithm is designed to solve the corresponding optimization problem. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed method based on a variety of standard datasets from different applied domains. Our experimental findings reveal that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithm.

Adaptive Low-Rank Regularization with Damping Sequences to Restrict Lazy Weights in Deep Networks

Overfitting is one of the critical problems in deep neural networks. Many regularization schemes try to prevent overfitting blindly. However, they decrease the convergence speed of training algorithms. Adaptive regularization schemes can solve overfitting more intelligently. They usually do not affect the entire network weights. This paper detects a subset of the weighting layers that cause overfitting. The overfitting recognizes by matrix and tensor condition numbers. An adaptive regularization scheme entitled Adaptive Low-Rank (ALR) is proposed that converges a subset of the weighting layers to their Low-Rank Factorization (LRF). It happens by minimizing a new Tikhonov-based loss function. ALR also encourages lazy weights to contribute to the regularization when epochs grow up. It uses a damping sequence to increment layer selection likelihood in the last generations. Thus before falling the training accuracy, ALR reduces the lazy weights and regularizes the network substantially. The experimental results show that ALR regularizes the deep networks well with high training speed and low resource usage.

Diverse and Styled Image Captioning Using SVD-Based Mixture of Recurrent Experts

With great advances in vision and natural language processing, the generation of image captions becomes a need. In a recent paper, Mathews, Xie and He [1], extended a new model to generate styled captions by separating semantics and style. In continuation of this work, here a new captioning model is developed including an image encoder to extract the features, a mixture of recurrent networks to embed the set of extracted features to a set of words, and a sentence generator that combines the obtained words as a stylized sentence. The resulted system that entitled as Mixture of Recurrent Experts (MoRE), uses a new training algorithm that derives singular value decomposition (SVD) from weighting matrices of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to increase the diversity of captions. Each decomposition step depends on a distinctive factor based on the number of RNNs in MoRE. Since the used sentence generator gives a stylized language corpus without paired images, our captioning model can do the same. Besides, the styled and diverse captions are extracted without training on a densely labeled or styled dataset. To validate this captioning model, we use Microsoft COCO which is a standard factual image caption dataset. We show that the proposed captioning model can generate a diverse and stylized image captions without the necessity of extra-labeling. The results also show better descriptions in terms of content accuracy.

Adaptive Low-Rank Factorization to regularize shallow and deep neural networks

The overfitting is one of the cursing subjects in the deep learning field. To solve this challenge, many approaches were proposed to regularize the learning models. They add some hyper-parameters to the model to extend the generalization; however, it is a hard task to determine these hyper-parameters and a bad setting diverges the training process. In addition, most of the regularization schemes decrease the learning speed. Recently, Tai et al. [1] proposed low-rank tensor decomposition as a constrained filter for removing the redundancy in the convolution kernels of CNN. With a different viewpoint, we use Low-Rank matrix Factorization (LRF) to drop out some parameters of the learning model along the training process. However, this scheme similar to [1] probably decreases the training accuracy when it tries to decrease the number of operations. Instead, we use this regularization scheme adaptively when the complexity of a layer is high. The complexity of any layer can be evaluated by the nonlinear condition numbers of its learning system. The resulted method entitled "AdaptiveLRF" neither decreases the training speed nor vanishes the accuracy of the layer. The behavior of AdaptiveLRF is visualized on a noisy dataset. Then, the improvements are presented on some small-size and large-scale datasets. The preference of AdaptiveLRF on famous dropout regularizers on shallow networks is demonstrated. Also, AdaptiveLRF competes with dropout and adaptive dropout on the various deep networks including MobileNet V2, ResNet V2, DenseNet, and Xception. The best results of AdaptiveLRF on SVHN and CIFAR-10 datasets are 98%, 94.1% F-measure, and 97.9%, 94% accuracy. Finally, we state the usage of the LRF-based loss function to improve the quality of the learning model.

Unsupervised Feature Selection based on Adaptive Similarity Learning and Subspace Clustering

Feature selection methods have an important role on the readability of data and the reduction of complexity of learning algorithms. In recent years, a variety of efforts are investigated on feature selection problems based on unsupervised viewpoint due to the laborious labeling task on large datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel approach on unsupervised feature selection initiated from the subspace clustering to preserve the similarities by representation learning of low dimensional subspaces among the samples. A self-expressive model is employed to implicitly learn the cluster similarities in an adaptive manner. The proposed method not only maintains the sample similarities through subspace clustering, but it also captures the discriminative information based on a regularized regression model. In line with the convergence analysis of the proposed method, the experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach as compared with the state of the art methods.

Regularized Deep Networks in Intelligent Transportation Systems: A Taxonomy and a Case Study

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are much correlated with data science mechanisms. Among the different correlation branches, this paper focuses on the neural network learning models. Some of the considered models are shallow and they get some user-defined features and learn the relationship, while deep models extract the necessary features before learning by themselves. Both of these paradigms are utilized in the recent intelligent transportation systems (ITS) to support decision-making by the aid of different operations such as frequent patterns mining, regression, clustering, and classification. When these learners cannot generalize the results and just memorize the training samples, they fail to support the necessities. In these cases, the testing error is bigger than the training error. This phenomenon is addressed as overfitting in the literature. Because, this issue decreases the reliability of learning systems, in ITS applications, we cannot use such over-fitted machine learning models for different tasks such as traffic prediction, the signal controlling, safety applications, emergency responses, mode detection, driving evaluation, etc. Besides, deep learning models use a great number of hyper-parameters, the overfitting in deep models is more attention. To solve this problem, the regularized learning models can be followed. The aim of this paper is to review the approaches presented to regularize the overfitting in different categories of ITS studies. Then, we give a case study on driving safety that uses a regularized version of the convolutional neural network (CNN).

A real-time decision support system for bridge management based on the rules generalized by CART decision tree and SMO algorithms

Under dynamic conditions on bridges, we need a real-time management. To this end, this paper presents a rule-based decision support system in which the necessary rules are extracted from simulation results made by Aimsun traffic micro-simulation software. Then, these rules are generalized by the aid of fuzzy rule generation algorithms. Then, they are trained by a set of supervised and the unsupervised learning algorithms to get an ability to make decision in real cases. As a pilot case study, Nasr Bridge in Tehran is simulated in Aimsun and WEKA data mining software is used to execute the learning algorithms. Based on this experiment, the accuracy of the supervised algorithms to generalize the rules is greater than 80%. In addition, CART decision tree and sequential minimal optimization (SMO) provides 100% accuracy for normal data and these algorithms are so reliable for crisis management on bridge. This means that, it is possible to use such machine learning methods to manage bridges in the real-time conditions.

Modified SMOTE Using Mutual Information and Different Sorts of Entropies

SMOTE is one of the oversampling techniques for balancing the datasets and it is considered as a pre-processing step in learning algorithms. In this paper, four new enhanced SMOTE are proposed that include an improved version of KNN in which the attribute weights are defined by mutual information firstly and then they are replaced by maximum entropy, Renyi entropy and Tsallis entropy. These four pre-processing methods are combined with 1NN and J48 classifiers and their performance are compared with the previous methods on 11 imbalanced datasets from KEEL repository. The results show that these pre-processing methods improves the accuracy compared with the previous stablished works. In addition, as a case study, the first pre-processing method is applied on transportation data of Tehran-Bazargan Highway in Iran with IR equal to 36.

A real-time warning system for rear-end collision based on random forest classifier

Rear-end collision warning system has a great role to enhance the driving safety. In this system some measures are used to estimate the dangers and the system warns drivers to be more cautious. The real-time processes should be executed in such system, to remain enough time and distance to avoid collision with the front vehicle. To this end, in this paper a new system is developed by using random forest classifier. To evaluate the performance of the proposed system, vehicles trajectory data of 100 car's database from Virginia tech transportation institute are used and the methods are compared based on their accuracy and their processing time. By using TOPSIS multi-criteria selection method, we show that the results of the implemented classifier is better than the results of different classifiers including Bayesian network, naive Bayes, MLP neural network, support vector machine, nearest neighbor, rule-based methods and decision tree. The presented experiments reveals that the random forest is an acceptable algorithm for the proposed driver assistant system with 88.4% accuracy for detecting warning situations and 94.7% for detecting safe situations.