AMachine Learning Approach to User Profiling for Data Annotation of Online Behavior

The user’s intent to seek online information has been an active area of research in user profiling.User profiling considers user characteristics,behaviors,activities,and preferences to sketch user intentions,interests,and motivations.Determining user characteristics can help capture implicit and explicit preferences and intentions for effective user-centric and customized content presentation.The user’s complete online experience in seeking information is a blend of activities such as searching,verifying,and sharing it on social platforms.However,a combination of multiple behaviors in profiling users has yet to be considered.This research takes a novel approach and explores user intent types based on multidimensional online behavior in information acquisition.This research explores information search,verification,and dissemination behavior and identifies diverse types of users based on their online engagement using machine learning.The research proposes a generic user profile template that explains the user characteristics based on the internet experience and uses it as ground truth for data annotation.User feedback is based on online behavior and practices collected by using a survey method.The participants include both males and females from different occupation sectors and different ages.The data collected is subject to feature engineering,and the significant features are presented to unsupervised machine learning methods to identify user intent classes or profiles and their characteristics.Different techniques are evaluated,and the K-Mean clustering method successfully generates five user groups observing different user characteristics with an average silhouette of 0.36 and a distortion score of 1136.Feature average is computed to identify user intent type characteristics.The user intent classes are then further generalized to create a user intent template with an Inter-Rater Reliability of 75%.This research successfully extracts different user types based on their preferences in online content,platforms,criteria,and frequency.The study also validates the proposed template on user feedback data through Inter-Rater Agreement process using an external human rater.

Hepatitis B Surface Antigen and Hepatitis C Virus Antibodies among Drug Users in Burkina Faso

Introduction: The epidemiology of both hepatitis B virus (HBV) and hepatitis C virus (HCV) infections among drug users (DUs) is little known in West Africa. The study aimed to assess the prevalence of hepatitis B and C viruses among drug users in Burkina Faso. Methodology: This was a cross-sectional biological and behavioral survey conducted between June and August 2022, among drug users in Ouagadougou and Bobo Dioulasso, the two main cities of Burkina Faso. A respondent-driven sampling (RDS) was used to recruit drug users. Hepatitis B surface antigen was determined using lateral flow rapid test kits and antibodies to hepatitis C virus in serum determined using an Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay. Data were entered and analyzed using Stata 17 software. Weighted binary logistic regression was used to identify the associated factors of hepatitis B and C infections and a p-value Results: A total of 323 drug users were recruited with 97.5% males. The mean age was 32.7 years old. The inhaled or smoked mode was the most used by drug users. The adjusted hepatitis B and hepatitis C prevalence among study participants were 11.1% and 2.3% respectively. The marital status (p = 0.001), and the nationality (p = 0.011) were significantly associated with hepatitis B infection. The type of drug used was not significantly associated with hepatitis B infection or hepatitis C infection. Conclusion: The prevalence of HBsAg and anti-HCV antibodies among DUs are comparable to those reported in the general population in Burkina Faso. This result suggests that the main routes of contamination by HBV and HCV among DUs are similar to those in the population, and could be explained by the low use of the injectable route by DUs in Burkina Faso.

Reform of the Irrigation Sector and Creation of Functional and Sustainable Irrigation Water Users Associations (AUEI) in Niger: Capitalization of the Experience of the Konni AHA

During the 1980s, as part of a policy of liberalization, following budgetary cuts linked to the implementation of structural adjustment programs, management responsibilities for AHAs were transferred from ONAHA to cooperatives concerned. Due to lack of financial resources, but also because of poor management, everywhere in Niger we are witnessing an accelerated deterioration of the irrigation infrastructure of hydro-agricultural developments. Institutional studies carried out on this situation led the State of Niger to initiate a reform of the governance of hydro-agricultural developments, by streng-thening the status of ONAHA, by creating an Association of Irrigation Water Users (AUEI) and by restructuring the old cooperatives. Indeed, this research aims to analyze the creation of functional and sustainable Irrigation Water User Associations (AUEI) in Niger in a context of reform of the irrigation sector, and based on the experience of the Konni AHA. It is based on a methodological approach which takes into account documentary research and the collection of data from 115 farmers, selected by reasoned choice and directly concerned by the management of the irrigated area. The data collected was analyzed and the results were analyzed using the systemic approach and the diagnostic process. The results show that the main mission of the AUEI is to ensure better management of water, hydraulic equipment and infrastructure on the hydro-agricultural developments of Konni. The creation of the Konni AUEI was possible thanks to massive support from the populations and authorities in the implementation process. After its establishment, the AUEI experienced a certain lethargy for some time due to the rehabilitation work of the AHA but currently it is functional and operational in terms of associative life and governance. Thus, the constraints linked to the legal system, the delay in the completion of the work, the uncertainties of access to irrigation water but also the problems linked to the change in mentality of certain ONAHA agents constitute the challenges that must be resolved in the short term for the operationalization of the Konni AUEI.

Prediction of users online purchase behavior based on selective ensemble learning

A probabilistic multi-dimensional selective ensemble learning method and its application in the prediction of users' online purchase behavior are studied in this work.Firstly, the classifier is integrated based on the dimension of predicted probability, and the pruning algorithm based on greedy forward search is obtained by combining the two indicators of accuracy and complementarity.Then the pruning algorithm is integrated into the Stacking ensemble method to establish a user online shopping behavior prediction model based on the probabilistic multi-dimensional selective ensemble method.Finally, the research method is compared with the prediction results of individual learners in ensemble learning and the Stacking ensemble method without pruning.The experimental results show that the proposed method can reduce the scale of integration, improve the prediction accuracy of the model, and predict the user's online purchase behavior.

The Research on E-mail Users' Behavior of Participating in Subjects Based on Social Network Analysis

The e-mail network is a type of social network. This study analyzes user behavior in e-mail subject participation in organizations by using social network analysis. First, the Enron dataset and the position-related information of an employee are introduced, and methods for deletion of false data are presented. Next, the three-layer model(User, Subject, Keyword) is proposed for analysis of user behavior. Then, the proposed keyword selection algorithm based on a greedy approach, and the influence and propagation of an e-mail subject are defined. Finally, the e-mail user behavior is analyzed for the Enron organization. This study has considerable significance in subject recommendation and character recognition.

Evaluation of Microblog Users’ Influence Based on PageRank and Users Behavior Analysis

This paper explores the uses’ influences on microblog. At first, according to the social network theory, we present an analysis of information transmitting network structure based on the relationship of following and followed phenomenon of microblog users. Informed by the microblog user behavior analysis, the paper also addresses a model for calculating weights of users’ influence. It proposes a U-R model, using which we can evaluate users’ influence based on PageRank algorithms and analyzes user behaviors. In the U-R model, the effect of user behaviors is explored and PageRank is applied to evaluate the importance and the influence of every user in a microblog network by repeatedly iterating their own U-R value. The users’ influences in a microblog network can be ranked by the U-R value. Finally, the validity of U-R model is proved with a real-life numerical example.

Cyberattack Detection Framework Using Machine Learning and User Behavior Analytics

This paper proposes a novel framework to detect cyber-attacks using Machine Learning coupled with User Behavior Analytics.The framework models the user behavior as sequences of events representing the user activities at such a network.The represented sequences are thenfitted into a recurrent neural network model to extract features that draw distinctive behavior for individual users.Thus,the model can recognize frequencies of regular behavior to profile the user manner in the network.The subsequent procedure is that the recurrent neural network would detect abnormal behavior by classifying unknown behavior to either regu-lar or irregular behavior.The importance of the proposed framework is due to the increase of cyber-attacks especially when the attack is triggered from such sources inside the network.Typically detecting inside attacks are much more challenging in that the security protocols can barely recognize attacks from trustful resources at the network,including users.Therefore,the user behavior can be extracted and ultimately learned to recognize insightful patterns in which the regular patterns reflect a normal network workflow.In contrast,the irregular patterns can trigger an alert for a potential cyber-attack.The framework has been fully described where the evaluation metrics have also been introduced.The experimental results show that the approach performed better compared to other approaches and AUC 0.97 was achieved using RNN-LSTM 1.The paper has been concluded with pro-viding the potential directions for future improvements.

Analysis of users’ electricity consumption behavior based on ensemble clustering

Due to the increase in the number of smart meter devices,a power grid generates a large amount of data.Analyzing the data can help in understanding the users’electricity consumption behavior and demands;thus,enabling better service to be provided to them.Performing power load profile clustering is the basis for mining the users’electricity consumption behavior.By examining the complexity,randomness,and uncertainty of the users’electricity consumption behavior,this paper proposes an ensemble clustering method to analyze this behavior.First,principle component analysis(PCA)is used to reduce the dimensions of the data.Subsequently,the single clustering method is used,and the majority is selected for integrated clustering.As a result,the users’electricity consumption behavior is classified into different modes,and their characteristics are analyzed in detail.This paper examines the electricity power data of 19 real users in China for simulation purposes.This manuscript provides a thorough analysis along with suggestions for the users’weekly electricity consumption behavior.The results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing Adaptive Technology for Multinode Users of Seawater Channel Based on Inductively Coupled Mooring Chain

As an important part of buoy-type ocean monitoring systems,the inductively coupled mooring chain solves the problem of data cotransmission through the multinode sensors that it carries,which is significant for the rapid acquisition of fish,hydrology,and other information.This paper is based on a seawater channel transmission model with a depth of 300 m and a bandwidth of 2 MHz.An orthogonal frequency division multiplexing(OFDM)technology is used to overcome the multipath effect of signal transmission on a seawater medium.The adaptive technology is integrated into the OFDM,and an improved joint subcarrier and bit power allocation algorithm is proposed.This algorithm solves the problem of dynamic subcarrier allocation during the cotransmission of underwater multinode user data in seawater channels.The results show that the algorithm complexity can be reduced by 0.18126×10^(-2)s during one complete OFDM system data transmission by the improved greedy algorithm,and a total of 216 bits are transmitted by the OFDM.The normalized channel capacity can be improved by 0.012 bit s^(-1)Hz^(-1).At the bit error ratio(BER)of 10^(-3),the BER performance can be improved by approximately 6 d B.When the numbers of users are 4 and 8,the improved algorithm increases the channel capacity,and the higher the number of users,the more evident the channel capacity improvement effect is.The results of this paper have an important reference value for enhancing the transmission performance of inductively coupled mooring chain underwater multinode data.

Effects of Emotion on Decision-Making ofMethamphetamine Users: Based on theEmotional Iowa Gambling Task

The relapse of methamphetamine (meth) is associated with decision-making dysfunction. The present study aims to investigate theimpact of different emotions on the decision-making behavior of meth users. We used 2 (gender: male, female) × 3 (emotion:positive, negative, neutral) × 5 (block: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) mixed experiment design. The study involved 168 meth users who weredivided into three groups: positive emotion, negative emotion and neutral emotion group, and tested by the emotional IowaGambling Task (IGT). The IGT performance of male users exhibited a decreasing trend from Block 1 to Block 3. Female methusers in positive emotion had the best performance in IGT than females in the other two groups. In positive emotion, the IGTperformance of female meth users was significantly better than that of men. Female meth users in positive emotion had betterdecision-making than those in negative or neutral emotion. Female meth users in positive emotion had better decision-makingperformance than males in positive emotion. In negative and neutral emotions, there was no significant gender difference indecision-making.

Identification of Influential Users in Online Social Network: A Brief Overview

Information networks where users join a network, publish their own content, and create links to other users are called Online Social Networks (OSNs). Nowadays, OSNs have become one of the major platforms to promote both new and viral applications as well as disseminate information. Social network analysis is the study of these information networks that leads to uncovering patterns of interaction among the entities. In this regard, finding influential users in OSNs is very important as they play a key role in the success above phenomena. Various approaches exist to detect influential users in OSNs, starting from simply counting the immediate neighbors to more complex machine-learning and message-passing techniques. In this paper, we review the recent existing research works that focused on identifying influential users in OSNs.

Trip Purposes of Automobile Users Inference Using Multi-day Traffic Monitoring Data

Determining trip purpose is an important link to explore travel rules. In this paper,we takea utomobile users in urban areas as the research object,combine unsupervised learning and supervised learningm ethods to analyze their travel characteristics,and focus on the classification and prediction of automobileu sers’trip purposes. However,previous studies on trip purposes mainly focused on questionnaires and GPSd ata,which cannot well reflect the characteristics of automobile travel. In order to avoid the multi-dayb ehavior variability and unobservable heterogeneity of individual characteristics ignored in traditional traffic questionnaires,traffic monitoring data from the Northern District of Qingdao are used,and the K-meansc lustering method is applied to estimate the trip purposes of automobile users. Then,Adaptive Boosting(AdaBoost)and Random Forest(RF)methods are used to classify and predict trip purposes. Finally,ther esult shows:(1)the purpose of automobile users can be mainly divided into four clusters,which includeC ommuting trips,Flexible life demand travel in daytime,Evening entertainment and leisure shopping,andT axi-based trips for the first three types of purposes,respectively;(2)the Random Forest method performss ignificantly better than AdaBoost in trip purpose prediction for higher accuracy;(3)the average predictiona ccuracy of Random Forest under hyper-parameters optimization reaches96.25%,which proves the feasibilitya nd rationality of the above clustering results.

Reliable and Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning with Anomalous Users

Recently,various privacy-preserving schemes have been proposed to resolve privacy issues in federated learning(FL).However,most of them ignore the fact that anomalous users holding low-quality data may reduce the accuracy of trained models.Although some existing works manage to solve this problem,they either lack privacy protection for users’sensitive information or introduce a two-cloud model that is difficult to find in reality.A reliable and privacy-preserving FL scheme named reliable and privacy-preserving federated learning(RPPFL)based on a single-cloud model is proposed.Specifically,inspired by the truth discovery technique,we design an approach to identify the user’s reliability and thereby decrease the impact of anomalous users.In addition,an additively homomorphic cryptosystem is utilized to provide comprehensive privacy preservation(user’s local gradient privacy and reliability privacy).We give rigorous theoretical analysis to show the security of RPPFL.Based on open datasets,we conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that RPPEL compares favorably with existing works in terms of efficiency and accuracy.

Exploring users' within-site navigation behavior:A case study based on clickstream data

Purpose:The goal of our research is to suggest specific Web metrics that are useful for evaluating and improving user navigation experience on informational websites.Design/methodology/approach:We revised metrics in a Web forensic framework proposed in the literature and defined the metrics of footprint,track and movement.Data were obtained from user clickstreams provided by a real estate site’s administrators.There were two phases of data analysis with the first phase on navigation behavior based on user footprints and tracks,and the second phase on navigational transition patterns based on user movements.Findings:Preliminary results suggest that the apartment pages were heavily-trafficked while the agent pages and related information pages were underused to a great extent.Navigation within the same category of pages was prevalent,especially when users navigated among the regional apartment listings.However,navigation of these pages was found to be inefficient.Research limitations:The suggestions for navigation design optimization provided in the paper are specific to this website,and their applicability to other online environments needs to be verified.Preference predications or personal recommendations are not made during the current stage of research.Practical implications:Our clickstream data analysis results offer a base for future research.Meanwhile,website administrators and managers can make better use of the readily available clickstream data to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of their site navigation design.Originality/value:Our empirical study is valuable to those seeking analysis metrics for evaluating and improving user navigation experience on informational websites based on clickstream data.Our attempts to analyze the log file in terms of footprint,track and movement will enrich the utilization of such trace data to engender a deeper understanding of users’within-site navigation behavior.

User Preference Aware Hierarchical Edge-User Cooperative Caching Strategy

The emergence of various new services has posed a huge challenge to the existing network architecture.To improve the network delay and backhaul pressure,caching popular contents at the edge of network has been considered as a feasible scheme.However,how to efficiently utilize the limited caching resources to cache diverse contents has been confirmed as a tough problem in the past decade.In this paper,considering the time-varying user requests and the heterogeneous content sizes,a user preference aware hierarchical cooperative caching strategy in edge-user caching architecture is proposed.We divide the caching strategy into three phases,that is,the content placement,the content delivery and the content update.In the content placement phase,a cooperative content placement algorithm for local content popularity is designed to cache contents proactively.In the content delivery phase,a cooperative delivery algorithm is proposed to deliver the cached contents.In the content update phase,a content update algorithm is proposed according to the popularity of the contents.Finally,the proposed caching strategy is validated using the MovieLens dataset,and the results reveal that the proposed strategy improves the delay performance by at least 35.3%compared with the other three benchmark strategies.

Unveiling the brain’s symphony:exploring the necessity and sufficiency of neural networks in behavior control

Since the pioneering work by Broca and Wernicke in the 19th century,who examined individuals with brain lesions to associate them with specific behaviors,it was evident that behaviors are complex and cannot be fully attributable to specific brain areas alone.Instead,they involve connectivity among brain areas,whether close or distant.At that time,this approach was considered the optimal way to dissect brain circuitry and function.These pioneering efforts opened the field to explore the necessity or sufficiency of brain areas in controlling behavior and hence dissecting brain function.However,the connectivity of the brain and the mechanisms through which various brain regions regulate specific behaviors,either individually or collaboratively,remain largely elusive.Utilizing animal models,researchers have endeavored to unravel the necessity or sufficiency of specific brain areas in influencing behavior;however,no clear associations have been firmly established.

Channel Correlation Based User Grouping Algorithm for Nonlinear Precoding Satellite Communication System

Low Earth Orbit(LEO)multibeam satellites will be widely used in the next generation of satellite communication systems,whose inter-beam interference will inevitably limit the performance of the whole system.Nonlinear precoding such as Tomlinson-Harashima precoding(THP)algorithm has been proved to be a promising technology to solve this problem,which has smaller noise amplification effect compared with linear precoding.However,the similarity of different user channels(defined as channel correlation)will degrade the performance of THP algorithm.In this paper,we qualitatively analyze the inter-beam interference in the whole process of LEO satellite over a specific coverage area,and the impact of channel correlation on Signal-to-Noise Ratio(SNR)of receivers when THP is applied.One user grouping algorithm is proposed based on the analysis of channel correlation,which could decrease the number of users with high channel correlation in each precoding group,thus improve the performance of THP.Furthermore,our algorithm is designed under the premise of co-frequency deployment and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing(OFDM),which leads to more users under severe inter-beam interference compared to the existing research on geostationary orbit satellites broadcasting systems.Simulation results show that the proposed user grouping algorithm possesses higher channel capacity and better bit error rate(BER)performance in high SNR conditions relative to existing works.

Chinese Web users' daily image needs and seeking behavior in a Q&A community

Purpose： In order to further the understanding of Chinese Web users＇ image-seeking behavior, this study explores the kinds of images that Chinese Web users seek online and how they express their requests.Design/methodology/approach： We used five pairs of simulated keywords to collect 893 image-seeking questions from Baidu Zhidao. Then, we revised the subject category of questions to analyze popular image needs. In addition, we conducted content analysis and descriptive statistical analysis to identify image-seeking motivations and image features used in the requests in terms of the two theories of image feature classification and image use. Findings： Among the 893 questions, the image searches for entertainment accounted for 47.59%, more than the searches for professional knowledge （37.40%） and personal daily activities （15.01%）. With regard to motivation, over 60% of the questions were identified as used for learning, which is well over the proportion of questions used for illustrating. Thus, these questions requested images as sources of data rather than sources of objects. Non-visual features （47.58%） were used most frequently in question descriptions, slightly higher than semantic features （45.96%）. Users who lacked domain knowledge tended to use general words rather than specific words to describe their requests. However, not many users used syntactic featm＇es when seeking images. Nevertheless, most of the users had a fairly clear idea about what the target image should look like. Research limitations： We studied only one question and answer （Q＆A） community using five pairs of simulated keywords. Practical implications： The findings should be helpful in strengthening the functionality of Q＆A systems, promoting the theories of image feature classification, and shedding light on information literacy training.Originality/value： This study is one of the first research efforts that discusses Chinese Web users＇ daily image searches and querying behavior in natural language in a Q＆A community, which should help to further the understanding of the principles of image-seeking behavior among Chinese Web users.

Deep Learning Social Network Access Control Model Based on User Preferences

A deep learning access controlmodel based on user preferences is proposed to address the issue of personal privacy leakage in social networks.Firstly,socialusers andsocialdata entities are extractedfromthe social networkandused to construct homogeneous and heterogeneous graphs.Secondly,a graph neural networkmodel is designed based on user daily social behavior and daily social data to simulate the dissemination and changes of user social preferences and user personal preferences in the social network.Then,high-order neighbor nodes,hidden neighbor nodes,displayed neighbor nodes,and social data nodes are used to update user nodes to expand the depth and breadth of user preferences.Finally,a multi-layer attention network is used to classify user nodes in the homogeneous graph into two classes:allow access and deny access.The fine-grained access control problem in social networks is transformed into a node classification problem in a graph neural network.The model is validated using a dataset and compared with other methods without losing generality.The model improved accuracy by 2.18%compared to the baseline method GraphSAGE,and improved F1 score by 1.45%compared to the baseline method,verifying the effectiveness of the model.

Cluster DetectionMethod of Endogenous Security Abnormal Attack Behavior in Air Traffic Control Network

In order to enhance the accuracy of Air Traffic Control(ATC)cybersecurity attack detection,in this paper,a new clustering detection method is designed for air traffic control network security attacks.The feature set for ATC cybersecurity attacks is constructed by setting the feature states,adding recursive features,and determining the feature criticality.The expected information gain and entropy of the feature data are computed to determine the information gain of the feature data and reduce the interference of similar feature data.An autoencoder is introduced into the AI(artificial intelligence)algorithm to encode and decode the characteristics of ATC network security attack behavior to reduce the dimensionality of the ATC network security attack behavior data.Based on the above processing,an unsupervised learning algorithm for clustering detection of ATC network security attacks is designed.First,determine the distance between the clustering clusters of ATC network security attack behavior characteristics,calculate the clustering threshold,and construct the initial clustering center.Then,the new average value of all feature objects in each cluster is recalculated as the new cluster center.Second,it traverses all objects in a cluster of ATC network security attack behavior feature data.Finally,the cluster detection of ATC network security attack behavior is completed by the computation of objective functions.The experiment took three groups of experimental attack behavior data sets as the test object,and took the detection rate,false detection rate and recall rate as the test indicators,and selected three similar methods for comparative test.The experimental results show that the detection rate of this method is about 98%,the false positive rate is below 1%,and the recall rate is above 97%.Research shows that this method can improve the detection performance of security attacks in air traffic control network.