The spread of disinformation on social media platforms is harmful to society. This harm may manifest as a gradual degradation of public discourse; but it can also take the form of sudden dramatic events such as the recent insurrection on Capitol Hill. The platforms themselves are in the best position to prevent the spread of disinformation, as they have the best access to relevant data and the expertise to use it. However, mitigating disinformation is costly, not only for implementing detection algorithms or employing manual effort, but also because limiting such highly viral content impacts user engagement and thus potential advertising revenue. Since the costs of harmful content are borne by other entities, the platform will therefore have no incentive to exercise the socially-optimal level of effort. This problem is similar to that of environmental regulation, in which the costs of adverse events are not directly borne by a firm, the mitigation effort of a firm is not observable, and the causal link between a harmful consequence and a specific failure is difficult to prove. For environmental regulation, one solution is to perform costly monitoring to ensure that the firm takes adequate precautions according to a specified rule. However, a fixed rule for classifying disinformation becomes less effective over time, as bad actors can learn to sequentially and strategically bypass it. Encoding our domain as a Markov decision process, we demonstrate that no penalty based on a static rule, no matter how large, can incentivize adequate effort. Penalties based on an adaptive rule can incentivize optimal effort, but counterintuitively, only if the regulator sufficiently overreacts to harmful events by requiring a greater-than-optimal level of effort. We prescribe the design of mechanisms that elicit platforms' costs of precautionary effort relating to the control of disinformation.
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The commonly quoted error rates for QMC integration with an infinite low discrepancy sequence is $O(n^{-1}\log(n)^r)$ with $r=d$ for extensible sequences and $r=d-1$ otherwise. Such rates hold uniformly over all $d$ dimensional integrands of Hardy-Krause variation one when using $n$ evaluation points. Implicit in those bounds is that for any sequence of QMC points, the integrand can be chosen to depend on $n$. In this paper we show that rates with any $r<(d-1)/2$ can hold when $f$ is held fixed as $n\to\infty$. This is accomplished following a suggestion of Erich Novak to use some unpublished results of Trojan from the 1980s as given in the information based complexity monograph of Traub, Wasilkowski and Wo\'zniakowski. The proof is made by applying a technique of Roth with the theorem of Trojan. The proof is non constructive and we do not know of any integrand of bounded variation in the sense of Hardy and Krause for which the QMC error exceeds $(\log n)^{1+\epsilon}/n$ for infinitely many $n$ when using a digital sequence such as one of Sobol's. An empirical search when $d=2$ for integrands designed to exploit known weaknesses in certain point sets showed no evidence that $r>1$ is needed. An example with $d=3$ and $n$ up to $2^{100}$ might possibly require $r>1$.
Predictive coding offers a potentially unifying account of cortical function -- postulating that the core function of the brain is to minimize prediction errors with respect to a generative model of the world. The theory is closely related to the Bayesian brain framework and, over the last two decades, has gained substantial influence in the fields of theoretical and cognitive neuroscience. A large body of research has arisen based on both empirically testing improved and extended theoretical and mathematical models of predictive coding, as well as in evaluating their potential biological plausibility for implementation in the brain and the concrete neurophysiological and psychological predictions made by the theory. Despite this enduring popularity, however, no comprehensive review of predictive coding theory, and especially of recent developments in this field, exists. Here, we provide a comprehensive review both of the core mathematical structure and logic of predictive coding, thus complementing recent tutorials in the literature. We also review a wide range of classic and recent work within the framework, ranging from the neurobiologically realistic microcircuits that could implement predictive coding, to the close relationship between predictive coding and the widely-used backpropagation of error algorithm, as well as surveying the close relationships between predictive coding and modern machine learning techniques.
When are inferences (whether Direct-Likelihood, Bayesian, or Frequentist) obtained from partial data valid? This paper answers this question by offering a new asymptotic theory about inference with missing data that is more general than existing theories. By using more powerful tools from real analysis and probability theory than those used in previous research, it proves that as the sample size increases and the extent of missingness decreases, the mean-loglikelihood function generated by partial data and that ignores the missingness mechanism will almost surely converge uniformly to that which would have been generated by complete data; and if the data are Missing at Random, this convergence depends only on sample size. Thus, inferences from partial data, such as posterior modes, uncertainty estimates, confidence intervals, likelihood ratios, test statistics, and indeed, all quantities or features derived from the partial-data loglikelihood function, will be consistently estimated. They will approximate their complete-data analogues. This adds to previous research which has only proved the consistency and asymptotic normality of the posterior mode, and developed separate theories for Direct-Likelihood, Bayesian, and Frequentist inference. Practical implications of this result are discussed, and the theory is verified using a previous study of International Human Rights Law.
In the past decade, the social networks platforms and micro-blogging sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Weibo have become an integral part of our day-to-day activities and is widely used all over the world by billions of users to share their views and circulate information in the form of messages, pictures, and videos. These are even used by government agencies to spread important information through their verified Facebook accounts and official Twitter handles, as they can reach a huge population within a limited time window. However, many deceptive activities like propaganda and rumor can mislead users on a daily basis. In these COVID times, fake news and rumors are very prevalent and are shared in a huge number which has created chaos in this tough time. And hence, the need for Fake News Detection in the present scenario is inevitable. In this paper, we survey the recent literature about different approaches to detect fake news over the Internet. In particular, we firstly discuss fake news and the various terms related to it that have been considered in the literature. Secondly, we highlight the various publicly available datasets and various online tools that are available and can debunk Fake News in real-time. Thirdly, we describe fake news detection methods based on two broader areas i.e., its content and the social context. Finally, we provide a comparison of various techniques that are used to debunk fake news.
Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress towards computational fake news detection. To mitigate its negative impact, we argue that it is critical to understand what user attributes potentially cause users to share fake news. The key to this causal-inference problem is to identify confounders -- variables that cause spurious associations between treatments (e.g., user attributes) and outcome (e.g., user susceptibility). In fake news dissemination, confounders can be characterized by fake news sharing behavior that inherently relates to user attributes and online activities. Learning such user behavior is typically subject to selection bias in users who are susceptible to share news on social media. Drawing on causal inference theories, we first propose a principled approach to alleviating selection bias in fake news dissemination. We then consider the learned unbiased fake news sharing behavior as the surrogate confounder that can fully capture the causal links between user attributes and user susceptibility. We theoretically and empirically characterize the effectiveness of the proposed approach and find that it could be useful in protecting society from the perils of fake news.
Fake news can significantly misinform people who often rely on online sources and social media for their information. Current research on fake news detection has mostly focused on analyzing fake news content and how it propagates on a network of users. In this paper, we emphasize the detection of fake news by assessing its credibility. By analyzing public fake news data, we show that information on news sources (and authors) can be a strong indicator of credibility. Our findings suggest that an author's history of association with fake news, and the number of authors of a news article, can play a significant role in detecting fake news. Our approach can help improve traditional fake news detection methods, wherein content features are often used to detect fake news.
Precise user and item embedding learning is the key to building a successful recommender system. Traditionally, Collaborative Filtering(CF) provides a way to learn user and item embeddings from the user-item interaction history. However, the performance is limited due to the sparseness of user behavior data. With the emergence of online social networks, social recommender systems have been proposed to utilize each user's local neighbors' preferences to alleviate the data sparsity for better user embedding modeling. We argue that, for each user of a social platform, her potential embedding is influenced by her trusted users. As social influence recursively propagates and diffuses in the social network, each user's interests change in the recursive process. Nevertheless, the current social recommendation models simply developed static models by leveraging the local neighbors of each user without simulating the recursive diffusion in the global social network, leading to suboptimal recommendation performance. In this paper, we propose a deep influence propagation model to stimulate how users are influenced by the recursive social diffusion process for social recommendation. For each user, the diffusion process starts with an initial embedding that fuses the related features and a free user latent vector that captures the latent behavior preference. The key idea of our proposed model is that we design a layer-wise influence propagation structure to model how users' latent embeddings evolve as the social diffusion process continues. We further show that our proposed model is general and could be applied when the user~(item) attributes or the social network structure is not available. Finally, extensive experimental results on two real-world datasets clearly show the effectiveness of our proposed model, with more than 13% performance improvements over the best baselines.
Clustering is an essential data mining tool that aims to discover inherent cluster structure in data. For most applications, applying clustering is only appropriate when cluster structure is present. As such, the study of clusterability, which evaluates whether data possesses such structure, is an integral part of cluster analysis. However, methods for evaluating clusterability vary radically, making it challenging to select a suitable measure. In this paper, we perform an extensive comparison of measures of clusterability and provide guidelines that clustering users can reference to select suitable measures for their applications.
Recommender systems (RSs) provide an effective way of alleviating the information overload problem by selecting personalized items for different users. Latent factors based collaborative filtering (CF) has become the popular approaches for RSs due to its accuracy and scalability. Recently, online social networks and user-generated content provide diverse sources for recommendation beyond ratings. Although {\em social matrix factorization} (Social MF) and {\em topic matrix factorization} (Topic MF) successfully exploit social relations and item reviews, respectively, both of them ignore some useful information. In this paper, we investigate the effective data fusion by combining the aforementioned approaches. First, we propose a novel model {\em \mbox{MR3}} to jointly model three sources of information (i.e., ratings, item reviews, and social relations) effectively for rating prediction by aligning the latent factors and hidden topics. Second, we incorporate the implicit feedback from ratings into the proposed model to enhance its capability and to demonstrate its flexibility. We achieve more accurate rating prediction on real-life datasets over various state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we measure the contribution from each of the three data sources and the impact of implicit feedback from ratings, followed by the sensitivity analysis of hyperparameters. Empirical studies demonstrate the effectiveness and efficacy of our proposed model and its extension.
Owing to the recent advances in "Big Data" modeling and prediction tasks, variational Bayesian estimation has gained popularity due to their ability to provide exact solutions to approximate posteriors. One key technique for approximate inference is stochastic variational inference (SVI). SVI poses variational inference as a stochastic optimization problem and solves it iteratively using noisy gradient estimates. It aims to handle massive data for predictive and classification tasks by applying complex Bayesian models that have observed as well as latent variables. This paper aims to decentralize it allowing parallel computation, secure learning and robustness benefits. We use Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers in a top-down setting to develop a distributed SVI algorithm such that independent learners running inference algorithms only require sharing the estimated model parameters instead of their private datasets. Our work extends the distributed SVI-ADMM algorithm that we first propose, to an ADMM-based networked SVI algorithm in which not only are the learners working distributively but they share information according to rules of a graph by which they form a network. This kind of work lies under the umbrella of `deep learning over networks' and we verify our algorithm for a topic-modeling problem for corpus of Wikipedia articles. We illustrate the results on latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic model in large document classification, compare performance with the centralized algorithm, and use numerical experiments to corroborate the analytical results.
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