Understanding Concepts in Graph Signal Processing for Neurophysiological Signal Analysis

Multivariate signals, which are measured simultaneously over time and acquired by sensor networks, are becoming increasingly common. The emerging field of graph signal processing (GSP) promises to analyse spectral characteristics of these multivariate signals, while at the same time taking the spatial structure between the time signals into account. A central idea in GSP is the graph Fourier transform, which projects a multivariate signal onto frequency-ordered graph Fourier modes, and can therefore be regarded as a spatial analog of the temporal Fourier transform. This chapter derives and discusses key concepts in GSP, with a specific focus on how the various concepts relate to one another. The experimental section focuses on the role of graph frequency in data classification, with applications to neuroimaging. To address the limited sample size of neurophysiological datasets, we introduce a minimalist simulation framework that can generate arbitrary amounts of data. Using this artificial data, we find that lower graph frequency signals are less suitable for classifying neurophysiological data as compared to higher graph frequency signals. Finally, we introduce a baseline testing framework for GSP. Employing this framework, our results suggest that GSP applications may attenuate spectral characteristics in the signals, highlighting current limitations of GSP for neuroimaging.

SEA++: Multi-Graph-based High-Order Sensor Alignment for Multivariate Time-Series Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) methods have been successful in reducing label dependency by minimizing the domain discrepancy between a labeled source domain and an unlabeled target domain. However, these methods face challenges when dealing with Multivariate Time-Series (MTS) data. MTS data typically consist of multiple sensors, each with its own unique distribution. This characteristic makes it hard to adapt existing UDA methods, which mainly focus on aligning global features while overlooking the distribution discrepancies at the sensor level, to reduce domain discrepancies for MTS data. To address this issue, a practical domain adaptation scenario is formulated as Multivariate Time-Series Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (MTS-UDA). In this paper, we propose SEnsor Alignment (SEA) for MTS-UDA, aiming to reduce domain discrepancy at both the local and global sensor levels. At the local sensor level, we design endo-feature alignment, which aligns sensor features and their correlations across domains. To reduce domain discrepancy at the global sensor level, we design exo-feature alignment that enforces restrictions on global sensor features. We further extend SEA to SEA++ by enhancing the endo-feature alignment. Particularly, we incorporate multi-graph-based high-order alignment for both sensor features and their correlations. Extensive empirical results have demonstrated the state-of-the-art performance of our SEA and SEA++ on public MTS datasets for MTS-UDA.

MetaSymNet: A Dynamic Symbolic Regression Network Capable of Evolving into Arbitrary Formulations

Mathematical formulas serve as the means of communication between humans and nature, encapsulating the operational laws governing natural phenomena. The concise formulation of these laws is a crucial objective in scientific research and an important challenge for artificial intelligence (AI). While traditional artificial neural networks (MLP) excel at data fitting, they often yield uninterpretable black box results that hinder our understanding of the relationship between variables x and predicted values y. Moreover, the fixed network architecture in MLP often gives rise to redundancy in both network structure and parameters. To address these issues, we propose MetaSymNet, a novel neural network that dynamically adjusts its structure in real-time, allowing for both expansion and contraction. This adaptive network employs the PANGU meta function as its activation function, which is a unique type capable of evolving into various basic functions during training to compose mathematical formulas tailored to specific needs. We then evolve the neural network into a concise, interpretable mathematical expression. To evaluate MetaSymNet's performance, we compare it with four state-of-the-art symbolic regression algorithms across more than 10 public datasets comprising 222 formulas. Our experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms others consistently regardless of noise presence or absence. Furthermore, we assess MetaSymNet against MLP and SVM regarding their fitting ability and extrapolation capability, these are two essential aspects of machine learning algorithms. The findings reveal that our algorithm excels in both areas. Finally, we compared MetaSymNet with MLP using iterative pruning in network structure complexity. The results show that MetaSymNet's network structure complexity is obviously less than MLP under the same goodness of fit.

Estimating Propensity for Causality-based Recommendation without Exposure Data

Causality-based recommendation systems focus on the causal effects of user-item interactions resulting from item exposure (i.e., which items are recommended or exposed to the user), as opposed to conventional correlation-based recommendation. They are gaining popularity due to their multi-sided benefits to users, sellers and platforms alike. However, existing causality-based recommendation methods require additional input in the form of exposure data and/or propensity scores (i.e., the probability of exposure) for training. Such data, crucial for modeling causality in recommendation, are often not available in real-world situations due to technical or privacy constraints. In this paper, we bridge the gap by proposing a new framework, called Propensity Estimation for Causality-based Recommendation (PropCare). It can estimate the propensity and exposure from a more practical setup, where only interaction data are available without any ground truth on exposure or propensity in training and inference. We demonstrate that, by relating the pairwise characteristics between propensity and item popularity, PropCare enables competitive causality-based recommendation given only the conventional interaction data. We further present a theoretical analysis on the bias of the causal effect under our model estimation. Finally, we empirically evaluate PropCare through both quantitative and qualitative experiments.

A Canonical Data Transformation for Achieving Inter- and Within-group Fairness

Increases in the deployment of machine learning algorithms for applications that deal with sensitive data have brought attention to the issue of fairness in machine learning. Many works have been devoted to applications that require different demographic groups to be treated fairly. However, algorithms that aim to satisfy inter-group fairness (also called group fairness) may inadvertently treat individuals within the same demographic group unfairly. To address this issue, we introduce a formal definition of within-group fairness that maintains fairness among individuals from within the same group. We propose a pre-processing framework to meet both inter- and within-group fairness criteria with little compromise in accuracy. The framework maps the feature vectors of members from different groups to an inter-group-fair canonical domain before feeding them into a scoring function. The mapping is constructed to preserve the relative relationship between the scores obtained from the unprocessed feature vectors of individuals from the same demographic group, guaranteeing within-group fairness. We apply this framework to the COMPAS risk assessment and Law School datasets and compare its performance in achieving inter-group and within-group fairness to two regularization-based methods.

Graph Convolutional Network with Connectivity Uncertainty for EEG-based Emotion Recognition

Automatic emotion recognition based on multichannel Electroencephalography (EEG) holds great potential in advancing human-computer interaction. However, several significant challenges persist in existing research on algorithmic emotion recognition. These challenges include the need for a robust model to effectively learn discriminative node attributes over long paths, the exploration of ambiguous topological information in EEG channels and effective frequency bands, and the mapping between intrinsic data qualities and provided labels. To address these challenges, this study introduces the distribution-based uncertainty method to represent spatial dependencies and temporal-spectral relativeness in EEG signals based on Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) architecture that adaptively assigns weights to functional aggregate node features, enabling effective long-path capturing while mitigating over-smoothing phenomena. Moreover, the graph mixup technique is employed to enhance latent connected edges and mitigate noisy label issues. Furthermore, we integrate the uncertainty learning method with deep GCN weights in a one-way learning fashion, termed Connectivity Uncertainty GCN (CU-GCN). We evaluate our approach on two widely used datasets, namely SEED and SEEDIV, for emotion recognition tasks. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our methodology over previous methods, yielding positive and significant improvements. Ablation studies confirm the substantial contributions of each component to the overall performance.

Graph Neural Network-based EEG Classification: A Survey

Graph neural networks (GNN) are increasingly used to classify EEG for tasks such as emotion recognition, motor imagery and neurological diseases and disorders. A wide range of methods have been proposed to design GNN-based classifiers. Therefore, there is a need for a systematic review and categorisation of these approaches. We exhaustively search the published literature on this topic and derive several categories for comparison. These categories highlight the similarities and differences among the methods. The results suggest a prevalence of spectral graph convolutional layers over spatial. Additionally, we identify standard forms of node features, with the most popular being the raw EEG signal and differential entropy. Our results summarise the emerging trends in GNN-based approaches for EEG classification. Finally, we discuss several promising research directions, such as exploring the potential of transfer learning methods and appropriate modelling of cross-frequency interactions.

A Neural-Guided Dynamic Symbolic Network for Exploring Mathematical Expressions from Data

Symbolic regression (SR) is a powerful technique for discovering the underlying mathematical expressions from observed data. Inspired by the success of deep learning, recent efforts have focused on two categories for SR methods. One is using a neural network or genetic programming to search the expression tree directly. Although this has shown promising results, the large search space poses difficulties in learning constant factors and processing high-dimensional problems. Another approach is leveraging a transformer-based model training on synthetic data and offers advantages in inference speed. However, this method is limited to fixed small numbers of dimensions and may encounter inference problems when given data is out-of-distribution compared to the synthetic data. In this work, we propose DySymNet, a novel neural-guided Dynamic Symbolic Network for SR. Instead of searching for expressions within a large search space, we explore DySymNet with various structures and optimize them to identify expressions that better-fitting the data. With a topology structure like neural networks, DySymNet not only tackles the challenge of high-dimensional problems but also proves effective in optimizing constants. Based on extensive numerical experiments using low-dimensional public standard benchmarks and the well-known SRBench with more variables, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of fitting accuracy and robustness to noise.

Reinforcement-Enhanced Autoregressive Feature Transformation: Gradient-steered Search in Continuous Space for Postfix Expressions

Feature transformation aims to generate new pattern-discriminative feature space from original features to improve downstream machine learning (ML) task performances. However, the discrete search space for the optimal feature explosively grows on the basis of combinations of features and operations from low-order forms to high-order forms. Existing methods, such as exhaustive search, expansion reduction, evolutionary algorithms, reinforcement learning, and iterative greedy, suffer from large search space. Overly emphasizing efficiency in algorithm design usually sacrifices stability or robustness. To fundamentally fill this gap, we reformulate discrete feature transformation as a continuous space optimization task and develop an embedding-optimization-reconstruction framework. This framework includes four steps: 1) reinforcement-enhanced data preparation, aiming to prepare high-quality transformation-accuracy training data; 2) feature transformation operation sequence embedding, intending to encapsulate the knowledge of prepared training data within a continuous space; 3) gradient-steered optimal embedding search, dedicating to uncover potentially superior embeddings within the learned space; 4) transformation operation sequence reconstruction, striving to reproduce the feature transformation solution to pinpoint the optimal feature space.

Information Forensics and Security: A quarter-century-long journey

Information Forensics and Security (IFS) is an active R&D area whose goal is to ensure that people use devices, data, and intellectual properties for authorized purposes and to facilitate the gathering of solid evidence to hold perpetrators accountable. For over a quarter century since the 1990s, the IFS research area has grown tremendously to address the societal needs of the digital information era. The IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) has emerged as an important hub and leader in this area, and the article below celebrates some landmark technical contributions. In particular, we highlight the major technological advances on some selected focus areas in the field developed in the last 25 years from the research community and present future trends.