Multi-resolution Tensor Learning for Large-Scale Spatial Data

High-dimensional tensor models are notoriously computationally expensive to train. We present a meta-learning algorithm, MMT, that can significantly speed up the process for spatial tensor models. MMT leverages the property that spatial data can be viewed at multiple resolutions, which are related by coarsening and finegraining from one resolution to another. Using this property, MMT learns a tensor model by starting from a coarse resolution and iteratively increasing the model complexity. In order to not "over-train" on coarse resolution models, we investigate an information-theoretic fine-graining criterion to decide when to transition into higher-resolution models. We provide both theoretical and empirical evidence for the advantages of this approach. When applied to two real-world large-scale spatial datasets for basketball player and animal behavior modeling, our approach demonstrate 3 key benefits: 1) it efficiently captures higher-order interactions (i.e., tensor latent factors), 2) it is orders of magnitude faster than fixed resolution learning and scales to very fine-grained spatial resolutions, and 3) it reliably yields accurate and interpretable models.

Diffusion Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network: Data-Driven Traffic Forecasting

Spatiotemporal forecasting has various applications in neuroscience, climate and transportation domain. Traffic forecasting is one canonical example of such learning task. The task is challenging due to (1) complex spatial dependency on road networks, (2) non-linear temporal dynamics with changing road conditions and (3) inherent difficulty of long-term forecasting. To address these challenges, we propose to model the traffic flow as a diffusion process on a directed graph and introduce Diffusion Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (DCRNN), a deep learning framework for traffic forecasting that incorporates both spatial and temporal dependency in the traffic flow. Specifically, DCRNN captures the spatial dependency using bidirectional random walks on the graph, and the temporal dependency using the encoder-decoder architecture with scheduled sampling. We evaluate the framework on two real-world large scale road network traffic datasets and observe consistent improvement of 12% - 15% over state-of-the-art baselines.

Tensor Regression Meets Gaussian Processes

Low-rank tensor regression, a new model class that learns high-order correlation from data, has recently received considerable attention. At the same time, Gaussian processes (GP) are well-studied machine learning models for structure learning. In this paper, we demonstrate interesting connections between the two, especially for multi-way data analysis. We show that low-rank tensor regression is essentially learning a multi-linear kernel in Gaussian processes, and the low-rank assumption translates to the constrained Bayesian inference problem. We prove the oracle inequality and derive the average case learning curve for the equivalent GP model. Our finding implies that low-rank tensor regression, though empirically successful, is highly dependent on the eigenvalues of covariance functions as well as variable correlations.

Socratic Learning: Augmenting Generative Models to Incorporate Latent Subsets in Training Data

A challenge in training discriminative models like neural networks is obtaining enough labeled training data. Recent approaches use generative models to combine weak supervision sources, like user-defined heuristics or knowledge bases, to label training data. Prior work has explored learning accuracies for these sources even without ground truth labels, but they assume that a single accuracy parameter is sufficient to model the behavior of these sources over the entire training set. In particular, they fail to model latent subsets in the training data in which the supervision sources perform differently than on average. We present Socratic learning, a paradigm that uses feedback from a corresponding discriminative model to automatically identify these subsets and augments the structure of the generative model accordingly. Experimentally, we show that without any ground truth labels, the augmented generative model reduces error by up to 56.06% for a relation extraction task compared to a state-of-the-art weak supervision technique that utilizes generative models.

Learning from Multiway Data: Simple and Efficient Tensor Regression

Tensor regression has shown to be advantageous in learning tasks with multi-directional relatedness. Given massive multiway data, traditional methods are often too slow to operate on or suffer from memory bottleneck. In this paper, we introduce subsampled tensor projected gradient to solve the problem. Our algorithm is impressively simple and efficient. It is built upon projected gradient method with fast tensor power iterations, leveraging randomized sketching for further acceleration. Theoretical analysis shows that our algorithm converges to the correct solution in fixed number of iterations. The memory requirement grows linearly with the size of the problem. We demonstrate superior empirical performance on both multi-linear multi-task learning and spatio-temporal applications.

A Survey on Social Media Anomaly Detection

Social media anomaly detection is of critical importance to prevent malicious activities such as bullying, terrorist attack planning, and fraud information dissemination. With the recent popularity of social media, new types of anomalous behaviors arise, causing concerns from various parties. While a large amount of work have been dedicated to traditional anomaly detection problems, we observe a surge of research interests in the new realm of social media anomaly detection. In this paper, we present a survey on existing approaches to address this problem. We focus on the new type of anomalous phenomena in the social media and review the recent developed techniques to detect those special types of anomalies. We provide a general overview of the problem domain, common formulations, existing methodologies and potential directions. With this work, we hope to call out the attention from the research community on this challenging problem and open up new directions that we can contribute in the future.