Walking forward and backward: towards graph-based searching and mining

Fang, Yuan

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/72873 Copy

Description

Title

Walking forward and backward: towards graph-based searching and mining

Author(s)

Fang, Yuan

Issue Date

2015-01-21

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Chang, Kevin C.

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Chang, Kevin C.

Committee Member(s)

• Han, Jiawei
• Zhai, ChengXiang
• Krishnaswamy, Shonali

Department of Study

Computer Science

Discipline

Computer Science

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Graph
• searching and mining
• random walk
• semi-supervised learning
• smoothness

Abstract

"Graphs are powerful vehicles to represent data objects that are interconnecting or interacting with each other. We explore random walks on various kinds of graph to address different searching and mining scenarios. This dissertation focuses on two symmetric forms of random walk called the forward walk and backward walk, which can be applied to enrich three key tasks in searching and mining, namely, extraction, ranking and classification, in novel ways. More specifically, we enhance extraction with the metrics of probabilistic precision and recall, ranking with the senses of importance and specificity, and classification with heterogeneous contexts in terms of relationship type and confidence level. We further study the underpinning principle of random walks on a graph, which is often known as the smoothness assumption. We argue that smoothness is a pointwise property and requires probabilistic modeling. Thus, we propose a new framework to define pointwise smoothness probabilistically on a graph, which unifies two different ""modes"" of smoothness corresponding to the forward and backward random walks, respectively. Finally, our graph-based random walk solutions have consistently demonstrated promising empirical results for a wide range of searching and mining applications."

Graduation Semester

2014-12

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/72873

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2014 Yuan Fang

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