OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Efficient Mining of the Most Significant Patterns with Permutation Testing
Authors: Leonardo Pellegrina, Fabio Vandin
Venue: KDD
Year: 2018

The extraction of patterns displaying significant association with a class label is a key data mining task with wide application in many domains. We study a variant of the problem that requires to mine the top-k statistically significant patterns, thus providing tight control on the number of patterns reported in output. We develop TopKWY, the first algorithm to mine the top-k significant patterns while rigorously controlling the family-wise error rate of the output and provide theoretical evidence of its effectiveness. TopKWY crucially relies on a novel strategy to explore statistically significant patterns and on several key implementation choices, which may be of independent interest. Our extensive experimental evaluation shows that TopKWY enables the extraction of the most significant patterns from large datasets which could not be analyzed by the state-of-the-art. In addition, TopKWY improves over the state-of-the-art even for the extraction of all significant patterns.
An Extensible Event Extraction System With Cross-Media Event Resolution
Authors: Fabio Petroni, Natraj Raman, Timothy Nugent, Armineh Nourbakhsh, Zarko Panic, Sameena Shah, Jochen L. Leidner
Venue: KDD
Year: 2018

The automatic extraction of breaking news events from natural language text is a valuable capability for decision support systems. Traditional systems tend to focus on extracting events from a single media source and often ignore cross-media references. Here, we describe a large-scale automated system for extracting natural disasters and critical events from both newswire text and social media. We outline a comprehensive architecture that can identify, categorize and summarize seven different event types - namely floods, storms, fires, armed conflict, terrorism, infrastructure breakdown, and labour unavailability. The system comprises fourteen modules and is equipped with a novel coreference mechanism, capable of linking events extracted from the two complementary data sources. Additionally, the system is easily extensible to accommodate new event types. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the system.
Optimizing Cluster-based Randomized Experiments under Monotonicity
Authors: Jean Pouget-Abadie, Vahab S. Mirrokni, David C. Parkes, Edoardo M. Airoldi
Venue: KDD
Year: 2018

Cluster-based randomized experiments are popular designs for mitigating the bias of standard estimators when interference is present and classical causal inference and experimental design assumptions (such as SUTVA or ITR) do not hold. Without an exact knowledge of the interference structure, it can be challenging to understand which partitioning of the experimental units is optimal to minimize the estimation bias. In the paper, we introduce a monotonicity condition under which a novel two-stage experimental design allows us to determine which of two cluster-based designs yields the least biased estimator. We then consider the setting of online advertising auctions and show that reserve price experiments satisfy the monotonicity condition and the proposed framework and methodology apply. We validate our findings on an advertising auction dataset.
Societal Impact of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence
Authors: Foster J. Provost, James Hodson, Jeannette M. Wing, Qiang Yang, Jennifer Neville
Venue: KDD
Year: 2018

The explosion of interest in KDD and other Data Science/Machine Learning/AI conferences is just one of the many signs that these technologies are no longer confined to the realms of academia and a hand-full of tech companies. As our daily lives seamlessly integrate more and more data-driven applications, people's excitement is tempered by worry about the technologies' potential to disrupt their existence. Having worked for almost 30 years to design and develop these technologies, the KDD community now should examine and debate the impact of Machine Learning & AI on the broader world. Beyond the hype, where do we stand with respect to the dangers? What role can our community play to alleviate concerns around AI taking jobs, or taking over? How can the value derived from data be distributed fairly? Are concerns about inequity well-founded or rather largely problems of perception? What can be done to bring data hunger and data sharing concerns to a level of equilibrium? How do we prepare people to interact with intelligent systems at scale? Can we unleash the incredible responsiveness of the KDD community toward longer-term more impactful projects across sectors that are essential for social good, such as Health, Environmental Sustainability, and Public Welfare.
FAHES: A Robust Disguised Missing Values Detector
Authors: Abdulhakim Ali Qahtan, Ahmed K. Elmagarmid, Raul Castro Fernandez, Mourad Ouzzani, Nan Tang
Venue: KDD
Year: 2018

Missing values are common in real-world data and may seriously affect data analytics such as simple statistics and hypothesis testing. Generally speaking, there are two types of missing values: explicitly missing values (i.e. NULL values), and implicitly missing values (a.k.a. disguised missing values (DMVs)) such as "11111111" for a phone number and "Some college" for education. While detecting explicitly missing values is trivial, detecting DMVs is not; the essential challenge is the lack of standardization about how DMVs are generated. In this paper, we present FAHES, a robust system for detecting DMVs from two angles: DMVs as detectable outliers and as detectable inliers. For DMVs as outliers, we propose a syntactic outlier detection module for categorical data, and a density-based outlier detection module for numerical values. For DMVs as inliers, we propose a method that detects DMVs which follow either missing-completely-at-random or missing-at-random models. The robustness of FAHES is achieved through an ensemble technique that is inspired by outlier ensembles. Our extensive experiments using real-world data sets show that FAHES delivers better results than existing solutions.
Active Search of Connections for Case Building and Combating Human Trafficking
Authors: Reihaneh Rabbany, David Bayani, Artur Dubrawski
Venue: KDD
Year: 2018

How can we help an investigator to efficiently connect the dots and uncover the network of individuals involved in a criminal activity based on the evidence of their connections, such as visiting the same address, or transacting with the same bank account? We formulate this problem as Active Search of Connections, which finds target entities that share evidence of different types with a given lead, where their relevance to the case is queried interactively from the investigator. We present RedThread, an efficient solution for inferring related and relevant nodes while incorporating the user's feedback to guide the inference. Our experiments focus on case building for combating human trafficking, where the investigator follows leads to expose organized activities, i.e. different escort advertisements that are connected and possibly orchestrated. RedThread is a local algorithm and enables online case building when mining millions of ads posted in one of the largest classified advertising websites. The results of RedThread are interpretable, as they explain how the results are connected to the initial lead. We experimentally show that RedThread learns the importance of the different types and different pieces of evidence, while the former could be transferred between cases.
Building Near Realtime Contextual Recommendations for Active Communities on LinkedIn
Authors: Hema Raghavan
Venue: KDD
Year: 2018

At LinkedIn our mission is to build active communities for all of our members such that members are able to disseminate or seek professional content at the right time on the right channel. We mine a variety of data sources including LinkedIn's Economic Graph and member activities on the site and use large scale machine learning algorithms to recommend members to connect to people they might know to build active communities. We build real-time recommendations to disseminate information so that members never miss a relevant conversation that is going on in any of the communities they are part of. Through this talk we will showcase how we are trying to solve some of the most challenging problems on internet-scale social network analysis, streaming algorithms, and multi-objective optimization.
Computational Advertising at Scale
Authors: Suju Rajan
Venue: KDD
Year: 2018

Machine learning literature on Computational Advertising typically tends to focus on the simplistic CTR prediction problem which while being relevant is the tip of the iceberg in terms of the challenges in the field. There is also very little appreciation for the scale at which the real-time-bidding systems operate (200B bid requests/day) or the increasingly adversarial ecosystem all of which add a ton of constraints in terms of feasible solutions. In this talk, I'll highlight some recent efforts in developing models that try to better encapsulate the journey of an ad from the first display to a user to the effect on an actual purchase.
MiSoSouP: Mining Interesting Subgroups with Sampling and Pseudodimension
Authors: Matteo Riondato, Fabio Vandin
Venue: KDD
Year: 2018

We present MiSoSouP, a suite of algorithms for extracting high-quality approximations of the most interesting subgroups, according to different interestingness measures, from a random sample of a transactional dataset. We describe a new formulation of these measures that makes it possible to approximate them using sampling. We then discuss how pseudodimension, a key concept from statistical learning theory, relates to the sample size needed to obtain an high-quality approximation of the most interesting subgroups. We prove an upper bound on the pseudodimension of the problem at hand, which results in small sample sizes. Our evaluation on real datasets shows that MiSoSouP outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms offering the same guarantees, and it vastly speeds up the discovery of subgroups w.r.t. analyzing the whole dataset.
Market Design and Computerized Marketplaces
Authors: Alvin E. Roth
Venue: KDD
Year: 2018

Markets and marketplaces are ancient human artifacts, but in recent years they have become ever more important. In part this is because marketplaces are becoming computerized. Together with the introduction of smart phones, this also makes them ubiquitous. We can order car rides to the airport, plane rides to London, and hotel rooms for when we arrive, all on our smartphones. And as we do so we leave a data trail that is easily combined with other streams of data. This is changing not only how we interact with markets, but also how we manage and regard privacy. I'll discuss some recent developments in computerized markets and speculate about some still to come.
Improving Box Office Result Predictions for Movies Using Consumer-Centric Models
Authors: Rui Paulo Ruhrländer, Martin Boissier, Matthias Uflacker
Venue: KDD
Year: 2018

Recent progress in machine learning and related fields like recommender systems open up new possibilities for data-driven approaches. One example is the prediction of a movie's box office revenue, which is highly relevant for optimizing production and marketing. We use individual recommendations and user-based forecast models in a system that forecasts revenue and additionally provides actionable insights for industry professionals. In contrast to most existing models that completely neglect user preferences, our approach allows us to model the most important source for movie success: moviegoer taste and behavior. We divide the problem into three distinct stages: (i) we use matrix factorization recommenders to model each user's taste, (ii) we then predict the individual consumption behavior, and (iii) eventually aggregate users to predict the box office result. We compare our approach to the current industry standard and show that the inclusion of user rating data reduces the error by a factor of 2x and outperforms recently published research.
Parsing to Programs: A Framework for Situated QA
Authors: Mrinmaya Sachan, Eric P. Xing
Venue: KDD
Year: 2018

This paper introduces Parsing to Programs, a framework that combines ideas from parsing and probabilistic programming for situated question answering. As a case study, we build a system that solves pre-university level Newtonian physics questions. Our approach represents domain knowledge of Newtonian physics as programs. When presented with a novel question, the system learns a formal representation of the question by combining interpretations from the question text and any associated diagram. Finally, the system uses this formal representation to solve the questions using the domain knowledge. We collect a new dataset of Newtonian physics questions from a number of textbooks and use it to train our system. The system achieves near human performance on held-out textbook questions and section 1 of AP Physics C mechanics - both on practice questions as well as on freely available actual exams held in 1998 and 2012.
A Scalable Solution for Rule-Based Part-of-Speech Tagging on Novel Hardware Accelerators
Authors: Elaheh Sadredini, Deyuan Guo, Chunkun Bo, Reza Rahimi, Kevin Skadron, Hongning Wang
Venue: KDD
Year: 2018

Part-of-speech (POS) tagging is the foundation of many natural language processing applications. Rule-based POS tagging is a wellknown solution, which assigns tags to the words using a set of predefined rules. Many researchers favor statistical-based approaches over rule-based methods for better empirical accuracy. However, until now, the computational cost of rule-based POS tagging has made it difficult to study whether more complex rules or larger rulesets could lead to accuracy competitive with statistical approaches. In this paper, we leverage two hardware accelerators, the Automata Processor (AP) and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), to accelerate rule-based POS tagging by converting rules to regular expressions and exploiting the highly-parallel regular-expressionmatching ability of these accelerators. We study the relationship between rule set size and accuracy, and observe that adding more rules only poses minimal overhead on the AP and FPGA. This allows a substantial increase in the number and complexity of rules, leading to accuracy improvement. Our experiments on Treebank and Brown corpora achieve up to 2,600X and 1,914X speedups on the AP and on the FPGA respectively over rule-based methods on the CPU in the rule-matching stage, up to 58× speedup over the Perceptron POS tagger on the CPU in total testing time, and up to 253× speedup over the LSTM tagger on the GPU in total testing time, while showing a competitive accuracy compared to neural-network and statistical solutions.
Career Transitions and Trajectories: A Case Study in Computing
Authors: Tara Safavi, Maryam Davoodi, Danai Koutra
Venue: KDD
Year: 2018

From artificial intelligence to network security to hardware design, it is well-known that computing research drives many important technological and societal advancements. However, less is known about the long-term career paths of the people behind these innovations. What do their careers reveal about the evolution of computing research? Which institutions were and are the most important in this field, and for what reasons? Can insights into computing career trajectories help predict employer retention? In this paper we analyze several decades of post-PhD computing careers using a large new dataset rich with professional information, and propose a versatile career network model, R 3 , that captures temporal career dynamics. With R 3 we track important organizations in computing research history, analyze career movement between industry, academia, and government, and build a powerful predictive model for individual career transitions. Our study, the first of its kind, is a starting point for understanding computing research careers, and may inform employer recruitment and retention mechanisms at a time when the demand for specialized computational expertise far exceeds supply.
Active Deep Learning to Tune Down the Noise in Labels
Authors: Karan Samel, Xu Miao
Venue: KDD
Year: 2018

The great success of supervised learning has initiated a paradigm shift from building a deterministic software system to a probabilistic artificial intelligent system throughout the industry. The historical records in enterprise domains can potentially bootstrap the traditional business into the modern data-driven approach almost everywhere. The introduction of the Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) significantly reduces the efforts of feature engineering so that supervised learning becomes even more automated. The last bottleneck is to ensure the data quality, particularly the label quality, because the performance of supervised learning is bounded by the errors present in labels. In this paper, we present a new Active Deep Denoising (ADD) approach that first builds a DNN noise model, and then adopts an active learning algorithm to identify the optimal denoising function. We prove that under the low noise condition, we only need to query the oracle with log n examples where n is the total number in the data. We apply ADD on one enterprise application and show that it can effectively reduce 1/3 of the prediction error with only 0.1% of examples verified by the oracle.
Managing Computer-Assisted Detection System Based on Transfer Learning with Negative Transfer Inhibition
Authors: Issei Sato, Yukihiro Nomura, Shouhei Hanaoka, Soichiro Miki, Naoto Hayashi, Osamu Abe, Yoshitaka Masutani
Venue: KDD
Year: 2018

The reading workload for radiologists is increasing because the numbers of examinations and images per examination are increasing due to the technical progress on imaging modalities such as computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging. A computer-assisted detection (CAD) system based on machine learning is expected to assist radiologists. The preliminary results of a multi-institutional study indicate that the performance of the CAD system for each institution improved using training data of other institutions. This indicates that transfer learning may be useful for developing the CAD systems among multiple institutions. In this paper, we focus on transfer learning without sharing training data due to the need to protect personal information in each institution. Moreover, we raise a problem of negative transfer in CAD system and propose an algorithm for inhibiting negative transfer. Our algorithm provides a theoretical guarantee for managing CAD software in terms of transfer learning and exhibits experimentally better performance compared to that of the current algorithm in cerebral aneurysm detection.
Accelerated Equivalence Structure Extraction via Pairwise Incremental Search
Authors: Seiya Satoh, Yoshinobu Takahashi, Hiroshi Yamakawa
Venue: KDD
Year: 2018

Equivalence structure (ES) extraction can allow for finding correspondence relations between different sequential datasets. A K -dimensional ES is a set of K -tuples to specify K -dimensional sequences that are considered equivalent. Whether or not two K -dimensional sequences are equivalent is decided based on comparisons of all of their subsequences. ES extraction can be used for preprocessing for transfer learning or imitation learning, as well as an analysis of multidimensional sequences. A recently proposed method called incremental search (IS) was much faster than brute-force search. However, IS can still take a long time to obtain ESs, because ESs obtained by IS can be subsets of other ESs and such subsets must be removed in the process. In this paper, we propose a new fast method called pairwise incremental search (PIS). In the process of PIS, the aforementioned problem about subsets of ESs does not exist, because the elements of ESs are searched pairwise. As shown by results of two experiments we conducted, PIS was 48 times faster than IS in an experiment using synthetic datasets and 171 times faster in an experiment using motion capture datasets.
StepDeep: A Novel Spatial-temporal Mobility Event Prediction Framework based on Deep Neural Network
Authors: Bilong Shen, Xiaodan Liang, Yufeng Ouyang, Miaofeng Liu, Weimin Zheng, Kathleen M. Carley
Venue: KDD
Year: 2018

A mobility event occurs when a passenger moves out or takes off from a particular location. Mobility event prediction is of utmost importance in the field of intelligent transportation systems. It has a huge potential in solving important problems such as minimizing passenger waiting time and maximizing the utilization of the transportation resources by planning vehicle routes and dispatching transportation resources. Recently, numerous mobility pattern mining methods have been proposed to predict the transportation supply and demand in different locations. Those methods first reveal the event patterns of each Place of Interests (POI) independently and then employ a separate region function as a post-processing step. This separate process, that disregards the intrinsic spatial and temporal pattern correlations between POI, is sub-optimal and complex, resulting in a poor generalization in different scenarios. In this work, we propose a Spatial-Temporal mobility Event Prediction framework based on Deep neural network (StepDeep) for simultaneously taking into account all correlated spatial and temporal mobility patterns. StepDeep not only simplifies the prediction process but also enhances the prediction accuracy. Our StepDeep proposes a novel problem formulation towards an end-to-end mobility prediction framework, that is, switching mobility events over time in an area into an event video and then posing the mobility prediction problem as a video prediction task. Such a novel formulation can naturally encode spatial and temporal dependencies for each POI. StepDeep thus predicts the spatial-temporal events by incorporating the new time sensitive convolution filters, spatial sensitive convolution filters, and spatial-temporal sensitive convolution filters into a single network. We conduct experimental evaluations on a real-world 547-day New York City taxi trajectory dataset, which show that StepDeep provides higher prediction accuracy than five existing baselines. Moreover, StepDeep is generalizable and can be applied to numerous spatial-temporal event prediction scenarios.
Mobile Access Record Resolution on Large-Scale Identifier-Linkage Graphs
Authors: Xin Shen, Hongxia Yang, Weizhao Xian, Martin Ester, Jiajun Bu, Zhongyao Wang, Can Wang
Venue: KDD
Year: 2018

The e-commerce era is witnessing a rapid increase of mobile Internet users. Major e-commerce companies nowadays see billions of mobile accesses every day. Hidden in these records are valuable user behavioral characteristics such as their shopping preferences and browsing patterns. And, to extract these knowledge from the huge dataset, we need to first link records to the corresponding mobile devices. This Mobile Access Records Resolution (MARR) problem is confronted with two major challenges: (1) device identifiers and other attributes in access records might be missing or unreliable; (2) the dataset contains billions of access records from millions of devices. To the best of our knowledge, as a novel challenge industrial problem of mobile Internet, no existing method has been developed to resolve entities using mobile device identifiers in such a massive scale. To address these issues, we propose a SParse Identifier-linkage Graph (SPI-Graph) accompanied with the abundant mobile device profiling data to accurately match mobile access records to devices. Furthermore, two versions (unsupervised and semi-supervised) of Parallel Graph-based Record Resolution (PGRR) algorithm are developed to effectively exploit the advantages of the large-scale server clusters comprising of more than 1,000 computing nodes. We empirically show superior performances of PGRR algorithms in a very challenging and sparse real data set containing 5.28 million nodes and 31.06 million edges from 2.15 billion access records compared to other state-of-the-arts methodologies.