Time-aware Truth Discovery in Social Sensing

This paper presents a new principled framework for exploiting time-sensitive information to improve the truth discovery accuracy in social sensing applications. This work is motivated by the emergence of social sensing as a new paradigm of collecting observations about the physical environment from humans or devices on their behalf. These observations may be true or false, and hence are viewed as binary claims. A fundamental problem in social sensing applications lies in ascertaining the correctness of claims and the reliability of data sources. We refer to this problem as truth discovery. In this paper, we develop a new time-sensitive truth discovery scheme that explicitly incorporates the source responsiveness and the claim lifespan into a rigorous analytical framework. The preliminary results showed that our new scheme outperforms all compared baselines and significantly improves the truth discovery accuracy in social sensing applications.