A Completely Locale-independent Session-based Recommender System by Leveraging Trained Model

In this paper, we propose a solution that won the 10th prize in the KDD Cup 2023 Challenge Task 2 (Next Product Recommendation for Underrepresented Languages/Locales). Our approach involves two steps: (i) Identify candidate item sets based on co-visitation, and (ii) Re-ranking the items using LightGBM with locale-independent features, including session-based features and product similarity. The experiment demonstrated that the locale-independent model performed consistently well across different test locales, and performed even better when incorporating data from other locales into the training.

AIREX: Neural Network-based Approach for Air Quality Inference in Unmonitored Cities

Urban air pollution is a major environmental problem affecting human health and quality of life. Monitoring stations have been established to continuously obtain air quality information, but they do not cover all areas. Thus, there are numerous methods for spatially fine-grained air quality inference. Since existing methods aim to infer air quality of locations only in monitored cities, they do not assume inferring air quality in unmonitored cities. In this paper, we first study the air quality inference in unmonitored cities. To accurately infer air quality in unmonitored cities, we propose a neural network-based approach AIREX. The novelty of AIREX is employing a mixture-of-experts approach, which is a machine learning technique based on the divide-and-conquer principle, to learn correlations of air quality between multiple cities. To further boost the performance, it employs attention mechanisms to compute impacts of air quality inference from the monitored cities to the locations in the unmonitored city. We show, through experiments on a real-world air quality dataset, that AIREX achieves higher accuracy than state-of-the-art methods.