Structure-free Graph Condensation: From Large-scale Graphs to Condensed Graph-free Data

Graph condensation, which reduces the size of a large-scale graph by synthesizing a small-scale condensed graph as its substitution, has immediate benefits for various graph learning tasks. However, existing graph condensation methods rely on the joint optimization of nodes and structures in the condensed graph, and overlook critical issues in effectiveness and generalization ability. In this paper, we advocate a new Structure-Free Graph Condensation paradigm, named SFGC, to distill a large-scale graph into a small-scale graph node set without explicit graph structures, i.e., graph-free data. Our idea is to implicitly encode topology structure information into the node attributes in the synthesized graph-free data, whose topology is reduced to an identity matrix. Specifically, SFGC contains two collaborative components: (1) a training trajectory meta-matching scheme for effectively synthesizing small-scale graph-free data; (2) a graph neural feature score metric for dynamically evaluating the quality of the condensed data. Through training trajectory meta-matching, SFGC aligns the long-term GNN learning behaviors between the large-scale graph and the condensed small-scale graph-free data, ensuring comprehensive and compact transfer of informative knowledge to the graph-free data. Afterward, the underlying condensed graph-free data would be dynamically evaluated with the graph neural feature score, which is a closed-form metric for ensuring the excellent expressiveness of the condensed graph-free data. Extensive experiments verify the superiority of SFGC across different condensation ratios.

Local Contrastive Feature learning for Tabular Data

Contrastive self-supervised learning has been successfully used in many domains, such as images, texts, graphs, etc., to learn features without requiring label information. In this paper, we propose a new local contrastive feature learning (LoCL) framework, and our theme is to learn local patterns/features from tabular data. In order to create a niche for local learning, we use feature correlations to create a maximum-spanning tree, and break the tree into feature subsets, with strongly correlated features being assigned next to each other. Convolutional learning of the features is used to learn latent feature space, regulated by contrastive and reconstruction losses. Experiments on public tabular datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed method versus state-of-the-art baseline methods.

Deep Forest with Hashing Screening and Window Screening

As a novel deep learning model, gcForest has been widely used in various applications. However, the current multi-grained scanning of gcForest produces many redundant feature vectors, and this increases the time cost of the model. To screen out redundant feature vectors, we introduce a hashing screening mechanism for multi-grained scanning and propose a model called HW-Forest which adopts two strategies, hashing screening and window screening. HW-Forest employs perceptual hashing algorithm to calculate the similarity between feature vectors in hashing screening strategy, which is used to remove the redundant feature vectors produced by multi-grained scanning and can significantly decrease the time cost and memory consumption. Furthermore, we adopt a self-adaptive instance screening strategy to improve the performance of our approach, called window screening, which can achieve higher accuracy without hyperparameter tuning on different datasets. Our experimental results show that HW-Forest has higher accuracy than other models, and the time cost is also reduced.

OPP-Miner: Order-preserving sequential pattern mining

A time series is a collection of measurements in chronological order. Discovering patterns from time series is useful in many domains, such as stock analysis, disease detection, and weather forecast. To discover patterns, existing methods often convert time series data into another form, such as nominal/symbolic format, to reduce dimensionality, which inevitably deviates the data values. Moreover, existing methods mainly neglect the order relationships between time series values. To tackle these issues, inspired by order-preserving matching, this paper proposes an Order-Preserving sequential Pattern (OPP) mining method, which represents patterns based on the order relationships of the time series data. An inherent advantage of such representation is that the trend of a time series can be represented by the relative order of the values underneath the time series data. To obtain frequent trends in time series, we propose the OPP-Miner algorithm to mine patterns with the same trend (sub-sequences with the same relative order). OPP-Miner employs the filtration and verification strategies to calculate the support and uses pattern fusion strategy to generate candidate patterns. To compress the result set, we also study finding the maximal OPPs. Experiments validate that OPP-Miner is not only efficient and scalable but can also discover similar sub-sequences in time series. In addition, case studies show that our algorithms have high utility in analyzing the COVID-19 epidemic by identifying critical trends and improve the clustering performance.

GraSSNet: Graph Soft Sensing Neural Networks

In the era of big data, data-driven based classification has become an essential method in smart manufacturing to guide production and optimize inspection. The industrial data obtained in practice is usually time-series data collected by soft sensors, which are highly nonlinear, nonstationary, imbalanced, and noisy. Most existing soft-sensing machine learning models focus on capturing either intra-series temporal dependencies or pre-defined inter-series correlations, while ignoring the correlation between labels as each instance is associated with multiple labels simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a novel graph based soft-sensing neural network (GraSSNet) for multivariate time-series classification of noisy and highly-imbalanced soft-sensing data. The proposed GraSSNet is able to 1) capture the inter-series and intra-series dependencies jointly in the spectral domain; 2) exploit the label correlations by superimposing label graph that built from statistical co-occurrence information; 3) learn features with attention mechanism from both textual and numerical domain; and 4) leverage unlabeled data and mitigate data imbalance by semi-supervised learning. Comparative studies with other commonly used classifiers are carried out on Seagate soft sensing data, and the experimental results validate the competitive performance of our proposed method.

ST-PCNN: Spatio-Temporal Physics-Coupled Neural Networks for Dynamics Forecasting

Ocean current, fluid mechanics, and many other spatio-temporal physical dynamical systems are essential components of the universe. One key characteristic of such systems is that certain physics laws -- represented as ordinary/partial differential equations (ODEs/PDEs) -- largely dominate the whole process, irrespective of time or location. Physics-informed learning has recently emerged to learn physics for accurate prediction, but they often lack a mechanism to leverage localized spatial and temporal correlation or rely on hard-coded physics parameters. In this paper, we advocate a physics-coupled neural network model to learn parameters governing the physics of the system, and further couple the learned physics to assist the learning of recurring dynamics. A spatio-temporal physics-coupled neural network (ST-PCNN) model is proposed to achieve three goals: (1) learning the underlying physics parameters, (2) transition of local information between spatio-temporal regions, and (3) forecasting future values for the dynamical system. The physics-coupled learning ensures that the proposed model can be tremendously improved by using learned physics parameters, and can achieve good long-range forecasting (e.g., more than 30-steps). Experiments, using simulated and field-collected ocean current data, validate that ST-PCNN outperforms existing physics-informed models.

Physics-Coupled Spatio-Temporal Active Learning for Dynamical Systems

Spatio-temporal forecasting is of great importance in a wide range of dynamical systems applications from atmospheric science, to recent COVID-19 spread modeling. These applications rely on accurate predictions of spatio-temporal structured data reflecting real-world phenomena. A stunning characteristic is that the dynamical system is not only driven by some physics laws but also impacted by the localized factor in spatial and temporal regions. One of the major challenges is to infer the underlying causes, which generate the perceived data stream and propagate the involved causal dynamics through the distributed observing units. Another challenge is that the success of machine learning based predictive models requires massive annotated data for model training. However, the acquisition of high-quality annotated data is objectively manual and tedious as it needs a considerable amount of human intervention, making it infeasible in fields that require high levels of expertise. To tackle these challenges, we advocate a spatio-temporal physics-coupled neural networks (ST-PCNN) model to learn the underlying physics of the dynamical system and further couple the learned physics to assist the learning of the recurring dynamics. To deal with data-acquisition constraints, an active learning mechanism with Kriging for actively acquiring the most informative data is proposed for ST-PCNN training in a partially observable environment. Our experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets exhibit that the proposed ST-PCNN with active learning converges to near optimal accuracy with substantially fewer instances.

Predictive Modeling of Hospital Readmission: Challenges and Solutions

Hospital readmission prediction is a study to learn models from historical medical data to predict probability of a patient returning to hospital in a certain period, 30 or 90 days, after the discharge. The motivation is to help health providers deliver better treatment and post-discharge strategies, lower the hospital readmission rate, and eventually reduce the medical costs. Due to inherent complexity of diseases and healthcare ecosystems, modeling hospital readmission is facing many challenges. By now, a variety of methods have been developed, but existing literature fails to deliver a complete picture to answer some fundamental questions, such as what are the main challenges and solutions in modeling hospital readmission; what are typical features/models used for readmission prediction; how to achieve meaningful and transparent predictions for decision making; and what are possible conflicts when deploying predictive approaches for real-world usages. In this paper, we systematically review computational models for hospital readmission prediction, and propose a taxonomy of challenges featuring four main categories: (1) data variety and complexity; (2) data imbalance, locality and privacy; (3) model interpretability; and (4) model implementation. The review summarizes methods in each category, and highlights technical solutions proposed to address the challenges. In addition, a review of datasets and resources available for hospital readmission modeling also provides firsthand materials to support researchers and practitioners to design new approaches for effective and efficient hospital readmission prediction.

Learning Graph Neural Networks with Positive and Unlabeled Nodes

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are important tools for transductive learning tasks, such as node classification in graphs, due to their expressive power in capturing complex interdependency between nodes. To enable graph neural network learning, existing works typically assume that labeled nodes, from two or multiple classes, are provided, so that a discriminative classifier can be learned from the labeled data. In reality, this assumption might be too restrictive for applications, as users may only provide labels of interest in a single class for a small number of nodes. In addition, most GNN models only aggregate information from short distances (e.g., 1-hop neighbors) in each round, and fail to capture long distance relationship in graphs. In this paper, we propose a novel graph neural network framework, long-short distance aggregation networks (LSDAN), to overcome these limitations. By generating multiple graphs at different distance levels, based on the adjacency matrix, we develop a long-short distance attention model to model these graphs. The direct neighbors are captured via a short-distance attention mechanism, and neighbors with long distance are captured by a long distance attention mechanism. Two novel risk estimators are further employed to aggregate long-short-distance networks, for PU learning and the loss is back-propagated for model learning. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm.

User Response Prediction in Online Advertising

Online advertising, as the vast market, has gained significant attention in various platforms ranging from search engines, third-party websites, social media, and mobile apps. The prosperity of online campaigns is a challenge in online marketing and is usually evaluated by user response through different metrics, such as clicks on advertisement (ad) creatives, subscriptions to products, purchases of items, or explicit user feedback through online surveys. Recent years have witnessed a significant increase in the number of studies using computational approaches, including machine learning methods, for user response prediction. However, existing literature mainly focuses on algorithmic-driven designs to solve specific challenges, and no comprehensive review exists to answer many important questions. What are the parties involved in the online digital advertising eco-systems? What type of data are available for user response prediction? How to predict user response in a reliable and/or transparent way? In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of user response prediction in online advertising and related recommender applications. Our essential goal is to provide a thorough understanding of online advertising platforms, stakeholders, data availability, and typical ways of user response prediction. We propose a taxonomy to categorize state-of-the-art user response prediction methods, primarily focus on the current progress of machine learning methods used in different online platforms. In addition, we also review applications of user response prediction, benchmark datasets, and open-source codes in the field.