OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Learning in non-stationary environments with class imbalance
Authors: Thomas Ryan Hoens, Nitesh V. Chawla
Venue: Conference KDD 2012
Year: 2012

Learning in non-stationary environments is an increasingly important problem in a wide variety of real-world applications. In non-stationary environments data arrives incrementally, however the underlying generating function may change over time. In addition to the environments being non-stationary, they also often exhibit class imbalance. That is one class (the majority class) vastly outnumbers the other class (the minority class). This combination of class imbalance with non-stationary environments poses significant and interesting practical problems for classification. To overcome these issues, we introduce a novel instance selection mechanism, as well as provide a modification to the Heuristic Updatable Weighted Random Subspaces (HUWRS) method for the class imbalance problem. We then compare our modifications of HUWRS (called HUWRS.IP) to other state of the art algorithms, concluding that HUWRS. IP often achieves vastly superior performance.
Do cascades recur?
Authors: Justin Cheng, Lada A. Adamic, Jon M. Kleinberg, Jure Leskovec
Venue: Conference WWW 2016
Year: 2016

Cascades of information-sharing are a primary mechanism by which content reaches its audience on social media, and an active line of research has studied how such cascades, which form as content is reshared from person to person, develop and subside. In this paper, we perform a large-scale analysis of cascades on Facebook over significantly longer time scales, and find that a more complex picture emerges, in which many large cascades recur, exhibiting multiple bursts of popularity with periods of quiescence in between. We characterize recurrence by measuring the time elapsed between bursts, their overlap and proximity in the social network, and the diversity in the demographics of individuals participating in each peak. We discover that content virality, as revealed by its initial popularity, is a main driver of recurrence, with the availability of multiple copies of that content helping to spark new bursts. Still, beyond a certain popularity of content, the rate of recurrence drops as cascades start exhausting the population of interested individuals. We reproduce these observed patterns in a simple model of content recurrence simulated on a real social network. Using only characteristics of a cascade's initial burst, we demonstrate strong performance in predicting whether it will recur in the future.
Modeling and predicting retweeting dynamics via a mixture process
Authors: Jinhua Gao, Huawei Shen, Shenghua Liu, Xueqi Cheng
Venue: Conference WWW 2016
Year: 2016

Modeling and predicting retweeting dynamics in social media has important implications to an array of applications. Existing models either fail to model the triggering effect of retweeting dynamics, e.g., the model based on reinforced Poisson process, or are hard to be trained using only the retweeting dynamics of individual tweet, e.g., the model based on self-exciting Hawkes process. In this paper, motivated by the observation that each retweeting dynamics is generally dominated by a handful of key nodes that separately trigger a high number of retweets, we propose a mixture process to model and predict retweeting dynamics, with each subprocess capturing the retweeting dynamics initiated by a key node. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model.
Discriminative learning of infection models
Authors: Nir Rosenfeld, Mor Nitzan, Amir Globerson
Venue: Conference WSDM 2016
Year: 2016

Infection and diffusion processes over networks arise in many domains. These introduce many challenging prediction tasks, such as influence estimation, trend prediction, and epidemic source localization. The standard approach to such problems is generative: assume an underlying infection model, learn its parameters, and infer the required output. In order to learn efficiently, the chosen infection models are often simple, and learning is focused on inferring the parameters of the model rather than on optimizing prediction accuracy. Here we argue that for prediction tasks, a discriminative approach is more adequate. We introduce DIMPLE, a novel discriminative learning framework for training classifiers based on dynamic infection models. We show how highly non-linear predictors based on infection models can be "linearized" by considering a larger class of prediction functions. Efficient learning over this class is performed by constructing "infection kernels" based on the outputs of infection models, and can be plugged into any kernel-supporting framework. DIMPLE can be applied to virtually any infection-related prediction task and any infection model for which the desired output can be calculated or simulated. For influence estimation in well-known infection models, we show that the kernel can either be computed in closed form, or reduces to estimating co-influence of seed pairs. We apply DIMPLE to the tasks of influence estimation on synthetic and real data from Digg, and to predicting customer network value in Polly, a viral phone-based development-related service deployed in low-literate communities. Our results show that DIMPLE outperforms strong baselines.
Modeling and predicting retweeting dynamics on microblogging platforms
Authors: Shuai Gao, Jun Ma, Zhumin Chen
Venue: Conference WSDM 2015
Year: 2015

Popularity prediction on microblogging platforms aims to predict the future popularity of a message based on its retweeting dynamics in the early stages. Existing works mainly focus on exploring effective features for prediction, while ignoring the underlying arrival process of retweets. Also, the effect of user activity variation on the retweeting dynamics in the early stages has been neglected. In this paper, we propose an extended reinforced Poisson process model with time mapping process to model the retweeting dynamics and predict the future popularity. The proposed model explicitly characterizes the process through which a message gain its retweets, by capturing a power-law temporal relaxation function corresponding to the aging in the ability of the message to attract new retweets and an exponential reinforcement mechanism characterizing the "richer-get-richer" phenomenon. Further, we introduce the notation of weibo time and integrate a time mapping process into the proposed model to eliminate the effect of user activity variation. Extensive experiments on two Weibo datasets, with 10K and 18K messages respectively, well demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model in popularity prediction.
Primum non nocere: Healthcare in the digital age
Authors: Anjali Joshi
Venue: Conference WSDM 2017
Year: 2017

Internet search has become the first stop in many users' health journeys. Today, about 1 in 20 Google searches are related to healthcare. These queries span a broad range of information needs as people are looking for possible conditions related to their symptoms and are seeking to understand their diagnoses and prescribed treatments, decipher their test results, find pathways of self-care as well as connect to people with similar experiences.
Learning with Similarity Functions on Graphs using Matchings of Geometric Embeddings
Authors: Fredrik D. Johansson, Devdatt P. Dubhashi
Venue: Conference KDD 2015
Year: 2015

We develop and apply the Balcan-Blum-Srebro (BBS) theory of classification via similarity functions (which are not necessarily kernels) to the problem of graph classification. First we place the BBS theory into the unifying framework of optimal transport theory. This also opens the way to exploit coupling methods for establishing properties required of a good similarity function as per their definition. Next, we use the approach to the problem of graph classification via geometric embeddings such as the Laplacian, pseudo-inverse Laplacian and the Lovász orthogonal labellings. We consider the similarity function given by optimal and near--optimal matchings with respect to Euclidean distance of the corresponding embeddings of the graphs in high dimensions. We use optimal couplings to rigorously establish that this yields a "good" similarity measure in the BBS sense for two well known families of graphs. Further, we show that the similarity yields better classification accuracy in practice, on these families, than matchings of other well-known graph embeddings. Finally we perform an extensive empirical evaluation on benchmark data sets where we show that classifying graphs using matchings of geometric embeddings outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods.
Anatomical annotations for drosophila gene expression patterns via multi-dimensional visual descriptors integration: Multi-dimensional feature learning
Authors: Hongchang Gao, Lin Yan, Weidong Cai, Heng Huang
Venue: Conference KDD 2015
Year: 2015

In Drosophila gene expression pattern research, the in situ hybridization (ISH) image has become the standard technique to visualize and study the spatial distribution of RNA. To facilitate the search and comparison of Drosophila gene expression patterns during Drosophila embryogenesis, it is highly desirable to annotate the tissue-level anatomical ontology terms for ISH images. In ISH image annotations, the image content representation is crucial to achieve satisfactory results. However, existing methods mainly focus on improving the classification algorithms and only using simple visual descriptor. If we integrate the effective local and holistic visual descriptors via proper learning method, we can achieve more accurate image annotation results than using individual visual descriptor.
Detecting collusive spamming activities in community question answering
Authors: Yuli Liu, Yiqun Liu, Ke Zhou, Min Zhang, Shaoping Ma
Venue: Conference WWW 2017
Year: 2017

Community Question Answering (CQA) portals provide rich sources of information on a variety of topics. However, the authenticity and quality of questions and answers (Q&As) has proven hard to control. In a troubling direction, the widespread growth of crowdsourcing websites has created a large-scale, potentially difficult-to-detect workforce to manipulate malicious contents in CQA. The crowd workers who join the same crowdsourcing task about promotion campaigns in CQA collusively manipulate deceptive Q&As for promoting a target (product or service). The collusive spamming group can fully control the sentiment of the target. How to utilize the structure and the attributes for detecting manipulated Q&As? How to detect the collusive group and leverage the group information for the detection task?
Probabilistic social sequential model for tour recommendation
Authors: Vineeth Rakesh, Niranjan Jadhav, Alexander Kotov, Chandan K. Reddy
Venue: Conference WSDM 2017
Year: 2017

The pervasive growth of location-based services such as Foursquare and Yelp has enabled researchers to incorpo- rate better personalization into recommendation models by leveraging the geo-temporal breadcrumbs left by a plethora of travelers. In this paper, we explore Travel path recommendation, which is one of the applications of intelligent urban navigation that aims in recommending sequence of point of interest (POIs) to tourists. Currently, travelers rely on a tedious and time-consuming process of searching the web, browsing through websites such as Trip Advisor, and reading travel blogs to compile an itinerary. On the other hand, people who do not plan ahead of their trip find it extremely difficult to do this in real-time since there are no automated systems that can provide personalized itinerary for travelers. To tackle this problem, we propose a tour recommendation model that uses a probabilistic generative framework to incorporate user's categorical preference, influence from their social circle, the dynamic travel transitions (or patterns) and the popularity of venues to recommend sequence of POIs for tourists. Through comprehensive experiments over a rich dataset of travel patterns from Foursquare, we show that our model is capable of outperforming the state-of-the-art probabilistic tour recommendation model by providing contextual and meaningful recommendation for travelers.
Inferring twitter user locations with 10 km accuracy
Authors: KyoungMin Ryoo, Sue Moon
Venue: Conference WWW 2014
Year: 2014

Geographic locations of users form an important axis in public polls and localized advertising, but are not available by default. The number of users who make their locations public or use GPS tagging is relatively small, compared to the huge number of users in online social networking services and social media platforms. In this work we propose a new framework to infer a user's main location of activities in Twitter using their textual contents. Our approach is based on a probabilistic generative model that filters local words, employs data binning for scalability, and applies a map projection technique for performance. For Korean Twitter users, we report that 60% of users are identified within 10 km of their locations, a significant improvement over existing approaches.
Role-dynamics: fast mining of large dynamic networks
Authors: Ryan A. Rossi, Brian Gallagher, Jennifer Neville, Keith Henderson
Venue: Conference WWW 2012
Year: 2012

To understand the structural dynamics of a large-scale social, biological or technological network, it may be useful to discover behavioral roles representing the main connectivity patterns present over time. In this paper, we propose a scalable non-parametric approach to automatically learn the structural dynamics of the network and individual nodes. Roles may represent structural or behavioral patterns such as the center of a star, peripheral nodes, or bridge nodes that connect different communities. Our novel approach learns the appropriate structural role dynamics for any arbitrary network and tracks the changes over time. In particular, we uncover the specific global network dynamics and the local node dynamics of a technological, communication, and social network. We identify interesting node and network patterns such as stationary and non-stationary roles, spikes/steps in role-memberships (perhaps indicating anomalies), increasing/decreasing role trends, among many others. Our results indicate that the nodes in each of these networks have distinct connectivity patterns that are non-stationary and evolve considerably over time. Overall, the experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for fast mining and tracking of the dynamics in large networks. Furthermore, the dynamic structural representation provides a basis for building more sophisticated models and tools that are fast for exploring large dynamic networks.
Inferring social roles and statuses in social networks
Authors: Yuchen Zhao, Guan Wang, Philip S. Yu, Shaobo Liu, Simon Zhang
Venue: Conference KDD 2013
Year: 2013

Users in online social networks play a variety of social roles and statuses. For example, users in Twitter can be represented as advertiser, content contributor, information receiver, etc; users in Linkedin can be in different professional roles, such as engineer, salesperson and recruiter. Previous research work mainly focuses on using categorical and textual information to predict the attributes of users. However, it cannot be applied to a large number of users in real social networks, since much of such information is missing, outdated and non-standard. In this paper, we investigate the social roles and statuses that people act in online social networks in the perspective of network structures, since the uniqueness of social networks is connecting people. We quantitatively analyze a number of key social principles and theories that correlate with social roles and statuses. We systematically study how the network characteristics reflect the social situations of users in an online society. We discover patterns of homophily, the tendency of users to connect with users with similar social roles and statuses. In addition, we observe that different factors in social theories influence the social role/status of an individual user to various extent, since these social principles represent different aspects of the network. We then introduce an optimization framework based on Factor Conditioning Symmetry, and we propose a probabilistic model to integrate the optimization framework on local structural information as well as network influence to infer the unknown social roles and statuses of online users. We will present experiment results to show the effectiveness of the inference.
Pct: partial co-alignment of social networks
Authors: Jiawei Zhang, Philip S. Yu
Venue: Conference WWW 2016
Year: 2016

People nowadays usually participate in multiple online social networks simultaneously to enjoy more social network services. Besides the common users, social networks providing similar services can also share many other kinds of information entities, e.g., locations, videos and products. However, these shared information entities in different networks are mostly isolated without any known corresponding connections. In this paper, we aim at inferring such potential corresponding connections linking multiple kinds of shared entities across networks simultaneously. Formally, the problem is referred to as the network "Partial Co-alignmenT" (PCT) problem. PCT is an important problem and can be the prerequisite for many concrete cross-network applications, like social network fusion, mutual information exchange and transfer. Meanwhile, the PCT problem is also very challenging to address due to various reasons, like (1) the heterogeneity of social networks, (2) lack of training instances to build models, and (3) one-to-one constraint on the correspondence connections. To resolve these challenges, a novel unsupervised network alignment framework, UNICOAT (UNsupervIsed COncurrent AlignmenT)), is introduced in this paper. Based on the heterogeneous information, UNICOAT transforms the PCT problem into a joint optimization problem. To solve the objective function, the one-to-one constraint on the corresponding relationships is relaxed, and the redundant non-existing corresponding connections introduced by such a relaxation will be pruned with a novel network co-matching algorithm proposed in this paper. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world co-aligned social network datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of UNICOAT in addressing the PCT problem.
Mining touch interaction data on mobile devices to predict web search result relevance
Authors: Qi Guo, Haojian Jin, Dmitry Lagun, Shuai Yuan, Eugene Agichtein
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2013
Year: 2013

Fine-grained search interactions in the desktop setting, such as mouse cursor movements and scrolling, have been shown valuable for understanding user intent, attention, and their preferences for Web search results. As web search on smart phones and tablets becomes increasingly popular, previously validated desktop interaction models have to be adapted for the available touch interactions such as pinching and swiping, and for the different device form factors. In this paper, we present, to our knowledge, the first in-depth study of modeling interactions on touch-enabled device for improving Web search ranking. In particular, we evaluate a variety of touch interactions on a smart phone as implicit relevance feedback, and compare them with the corresponding fine-grained interactions on a desktop computer with mouse and keyboard as the primary input devices. Our experiments are based on a dataset collected from two user studies with 56 users in total, using a specially instrumented version of a popular mobile browser to capture the interaction data. We report a detailed analysis of the similarities and differences of fine-grained search interactions between the desktop and the smart phone modalities, and identify novel patterns of touch interactions indicative of result relevance. Finally, we demonstrate significant improvements to search ranking quality by mining touch interaction data.
Attention-driven factor model for explainable personalized recommendation
Authors: Jingwu Chen, Fuzhen Zhuang, Xin Hong, Xiang Ao, Xing Xie, Qing He
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2018
Year: 2018

Latent Factor Models (LFMs) based on Collaborative Filtering (CF) have been widely applied in many recommendation systems, due to their good performance of prediction accuracy. In addition to users' ratings, auxiliary information such as item features is often used to improve performance, especially when ratings are very sparse. To the best of our knowledge, most existing LFMs integrate different item features in the same way for all users. Nevertheless, the attention on different item attributes varies a lot from user to user. For personalized recommendation, it is valuable to know what feature of an item a user cares most about. Besides, the latent vectors used to represent users or items in LFMs have few explicit meanings, which makes it difficult to explain why an item is recommended to a specific user. In this work, we propose the Attention-driven Factor Model (AFM), which can not only integrate item features driven by users' attention but also help answer this "why". To estimate users' attention distributions on different item features, we propose the Gated Attention Units (GAUs) for AFM. The GAUs make it possible to let the latent factors "talk", by generating user attention distributions from user latent vectors. With users' attention distributions, we can tune the weights of item features for different users. Moreover, users' attention distributions can also serve as explanations for our recommendations. Experiments on several real-world datasets demonstrate the advantages of AFM (using GAUs) over competitive baseline algorithms on rating prediction.
HRAM: A hybrid recurrent attention machine for news recommendation
Authors: Dhruv Khattar, Vaibhav Kumar, Vasudeva Varma, Manish Gupta
Venue: Conference CIKM 2018
Year: 2018

Popular methods for news recommendation which are based on collaborative filtering and content-based filtering have multiple drawbacks. The former method does not account for the sequential nature of news reading and suffers from the problem of cold-start, while the latter, suffers from over-specialization. In order to address these issues for news recommendation we propose a Hybrid Recurrent Attention Machine (HRAM). HRAM consists of two components. The first component utilizes a neural network for matrix factorization. While in the second component, we first learn the distributed representation of each news article. We then use the historical data of the user in a sequential manner and feed it to an attention-based recurrent layer. Finally, we concatenate the outputs from both these components and use further hidden layers in order to make predictions. In this way, we harness the information present in the user reading history and boost it with the information available through collaborative filtering for providing better news recommendations. Extensive experiments over two real-world datasets show that the proposed model provides significant improvement over the state-of-the-art.