Analysis

Digital traces, including online communications (e.g., emails, social media), cellphone records, collaboration data (e.g., scholarly publications), and consumer behavior data, offer tremendous opportunities to study human social behaviors. Our research incorporates multidisciplinary methodologies, including network science methods, linguistic analysis, data mining and mixed methods data analysis, to characterize the patterns of individual and collective activities at a societal scale. These studies reflect the regularities and changes in various aspects of human and social dynamics. Our work has focused on tracing collective attention and social processes in response to disaster events, as well as on making predictions about how certain disasters or disruptions could develop.

Selected publication
  • Teng, X., Lin, Y., Chung, W., Li, A., & Kovashka, A. Characterizing User Susceptibility to COVID-19 Misinformation on Twitter. (2022) In Proceedings of the 16th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2022), 2022. AAAI PDFcode
  • Lin, Y., & Chung, W. The Dynamics of Twitter Users' Gun Narratives across Major Mass Shooting Events. (2020) Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 7(1): 46. 2020. paperdata
  • Ertugrul, A., Lin, Y.-R., Chung, W.-T., Yan, M., Li, A. (2019). Activism via Attention: Interpretable Spatiotemporal Learning to Forecast Protest Activities. EPJ Data Science (doi: 10.1140/epjds/s13688-019-0183-y) PDFcode
  • Lin, Y.-R., Margolin, D., Wen, X. (2017). Tracking and Analyzing Individual Distress Following Terrorist Attacks Using Social Media Streams. Risk Analysis (doi:10.1111/risa.12829) PDF
Mining

We are developing new data mining approaches for temporal and structural analyses of multi-relational social networks. Our research incorporates graph mining, tensor analysis, and other statistical learning methods including deep learning. The applications include urban analytics, automatic discovery of disaster impact, anomaly detection from multi-source social systems, and link prediction in dynamic networks.

Selected publication
  • Teng, X., Pei, S., & Lin, Y. StoCast: Stochastic Disease Forecasting with Progression Uncertainty. IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, 25(3): 850–861. 2021. PDF
  • Ertugrul, A., Lin, Y.-R., Temizel, T. (2019). CASTNet: Community-Attentive Spatio-Temporal Networks for Opioid Overdose Forecasting. In Proceedings of Joint European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD 2019) (ADS Track) PDFcode
  • Wen, X., Lin, Y.-R., Pelechrinis, K. (2018). Event Analytics via Discriminant Tensor Factorization. ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD), 12(6), 72 (doi: 10.1145/3184455) PDFcode
  • Teng, X., Yan, M., Ertugrul, A., Lin, Y.-R. (2018). Deep into Hypersphere: Robust and Unsupervised Anomaly Discovery in Dynamic Networks. In Proceedings of the 27th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2018) PDFcode
Visual Analytics

Visual analytics aims to offer tools for people to find latent information in a complex situation, in an intuitive manner. Recent available datasets (including social media data) are usually big in volume, dynamic in time, and have rich contexts with heterogeneous data types and attribute values, which makes the traditional visualization techniques (e.g., graph/network representation) not applicable. We are developing interactive visualization techniques based on novel abstractions of heterogeneous data and the integration of human-machine interaction theories and data mining methods.

Selected publication
  • Ahn, Y., Yan, M., Lin, Y., Chung, W., & Hwa, R. (2022) Tribe or Not? Critical Inspection of Group Differences Using TribalGram. ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS), 12(1): 1–34. 2022. (doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2019.2934262) paper
  • Ahn, Y., & Lin, Y. R. (2019). Fairsight: Visual analytics for fairness in decision making. IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics (TVCG), 26(1), 1086-1095. (doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2019.2934262) PDFcode
  • Cao, N., Lin, C., Zhu, Q., Lin, Y.-R., Teng, X., Wen, X. (2017). Voila: Visual Anomaly Detection and Monitoring with Streaming Spatiotemporal Data. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) PDFvideo