No abstract

The burgeoning use of Web 2.0-powered social media in recent years has inspired numerous studies on the content and composition of online social networks (OSNs). Many methods of harvesting useful information from social networks' immense amounts of user-generated data have been successfully applied to such real-world topics as politics and marketing, to name just a few. This study presents a novel twist on two popular techniques for studying OSNs: community detection and sentiment analysis. Using sentiment classification to enhance community detection and community partitions to permit more in-depth analysis of sentiment data, these two techniques are brought together to analyze four networks from the Twitter OSN. The Twitter networks used for this study are extracted from four accounts related to Microsoft Corporation, and together encompass more than 60,000 users and 2 million tweets collected over a period of 32 days. By combining community detection and sentiment analysis, modularity values were increased for the community partitions detected in three of the four networks studied. Furthermore, data collected during the community detection process enabled more granular, community-level sentiment analysis on a specific topic referenced by users in the dataset.

With the rapid growth of the Internet in recent years, the ability to analyze and identify its users has become increasingly important. Authorship analysis provides a means to glean information about the author of a document originating from the internet or elsewhere, including but not limited to the author’s gender. There are well-known linguistic differences between the writing of men and women, and these differences can be effectively used to predict the gender of a document’s author. Capitalizing on these linguistic nuances, this study uses a set of stylometric features and a set of word count features to facilitate automatic gender discrimination on emails from the popular Enron email dataset. These features are used in conjunction with the Modified Balanced Winnow Neural Network proposed by Carvalho and Cohen, an improvement on the original Balanced Winnow created by Littlestone. Experiments with the Modified Balanced Winnow show that it is effectively able to discriminate gender using both stylometric and word count features, with the word count features providing superior results

With the rapid growth of web-based social networking technologies in recent years, author identification and analysis have proven increasingly useful. Authorship analysis provides information about a document's author, often including the author's gender. Men and women are known to write in distinctly different ways, and these differences can be successfully used to make a gender prediction. Making use of these distinctions between male and female authors, this study demonstrates the use of a simple stream-based neural network to automatically discriminate gender on manually labeled tweets from the Twitter social network. This neural network, the Modified Balanced Winnow, was employed in two ways; the effectiveness of data stream mining was initially examined with an extensive list of n-gram features. Feature selection techniques were then evaluated by drastically reducing the feature list using WEKA's attribute selection algorithms. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of the stream mining approach, achieving an accuracy of 82.48%, a 20.81% increase above the baseline prediction. Using feature selection methods improved the results by an additional 16.03%, to an accuracy of 98.51%.

In recent years, significant research has been devoted to the development of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) able to detect anomalous computer network traffic indicative of malicious activity. While signature-based IDS have proven effective in discovering known attacks, anomaly-based IDS hold the even greater promise of being able to automatically detect previously undocumented threats. Traditional IDS are generally trained in batch mode, and therefore cannot adapt to evolving network data streams in real time. To resolve this limitation, data stream mining techniques can be utilized to create a new type of IDS able to dynamically model a stream of network traffic. In this paper, we present two methods for anomalous network packet detection based on the data stream mining paradigm. The first of these is an adapted version of the DenStream algorithm for stream clustering specifically tailored to evaluate network traffic. In this algorithm, individual packets are treated as points and are flagged as normal or abnormal based on their belonging to either normal or outlier clusters. The second algorithm utilizes a histogram to create a model of the evolving network traffic to which incoming traffic can be compared using Pearson correlation. Both of these algorithms were tested using the first week of data from the DARPA ’99 dataset with Generic HTTP, Shell-code and Polymorphic attacks inserted. We were able to achieve reasonably high detection rates with moderately low false positive percentages for different types of attacks, though detection rates varied between the two algorithms. Overall, the histogram-based detection algorithm achieved slightly superior results, but required more parameters than the clustering-based algorithm. As a result of its fewer parameter requirements, the clustering approach can be more easily generalized to different types of network traffic streams