
Using an electrical circuit solver to track ad click fraud - adityab
http://saidinesh5.wordpress.com/2012/06/11/an-interesting-solution-to-a-not-so-tricky-problem/
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vtaeed
Server/article is down. Its a rather interesting problem and it generated lots
of questions. One immediate question is how you determine the the nodes that
sit on the rail voltages (i.e. the good and bad nodes)? Would be interesting
to see if how they measured the success of this solution in reducing click
fraud etc.

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saidinesh5
Hi, I am sorry. I am no longer permitted to share that piece of work. And
hence I took down the blog post.

Thank You.

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vtaeed
Unfortunate but completely understandable - its difficult to publish work
related to stopping fraud.

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politician
Meta-question: If the author is no longer able to publish the work, but HN
still hosts the article comments with the title "Using an electrical circuit
solver to track ad click fraud," then isn't the cat already out of the bag?

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saidinesh5
At this point of time, i honestly believe that it was an open problem in the
public domain, that any high school student could have solved (at least, when
nudged in the right direction)... And I am pretty sure that a lot of people
have come up with a lot more useful/interesting solutions.

And that's why I openly shared my work, hoping that it would be just an
interesting little observation...

So I don't believe that the cat was ever hiding in a bag ...

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smarty2890
This can actually be improved by adding few capacitors at the nodes which
would take into account, how many clicks a user has been better than the the
black-listed ones or worse than the white-listed ones.

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tonyarkles
I'm not sure how capacitors would help at all. From what I can tell, they're
just solving for the steady-state DC case; in that condition, capacitors are
essentially open and have no effect on the analysis.

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mjw
Ad-hoc as the use of a circuit solver might seem, there is some quite
interesting machine learning literature on the use of resistive networks to do
"graph transduction", e.g.:

Mark Herbster, Resistive geometry for graph-based transduction
<http://eprints.pascal-network.org/archive/00006759/>

The application in this paper is fairly similar too (spam detection in a large
graph)

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saidinesh5
Thanks a ton for this link! :)

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gouranga
This is the first time I've seen SPICE used as suitable duct tape for a
problem.

Interesting solution! Thanks for posting.

