Knowledge-aware Complementary Product Representation Learning

Learning product representations that reflect complementary relationship plays a central role in e-commerce recommender system. In the absence of the product relationships graph, which existing methods rely on, there is a need to detect the complementary relationships directly from noisy and sparse customer purchase activities. Furthermore, unlike simple relationships such as similarity, complementariness is asymmetric and non-transitive. Standard usage of representation learning emphasizes on only one set of embedding, which is problematic for modelling such properties of complementariness. We propose using knowledge-aware learning with dual product embedding to solve the above challenges. We encode contextual knowledge into product representation by multi-task learning, to alleviate the sparsity issue. By explicitly modelling with user bias terms, we separate the noise of customer-specific preferences from the complementariness. Furthermore, we adopt the dual embedding framework to capture the intrinsic properties of complementariness and provide geometric interpretation motivated by the classic separating hyperplane theory. Finally, we propose a Bayesian network structure that unifies all the components, which also concludes several popular models as special cases. The proposed method compares favourably to state-of-art methods, in downstream classification and recommendation tasks. We also develop an implementation that scales efficiently to a dataset with millions of items and customers

Finding the True Frequent Itemsets

Frequent Itemsets (FIs) mining is a fundamental primitive in data mining. It requires to identify all itemsets appearing in at least a fraction $\theta$ of a transactional dataset $\mathcal{D}$. Often though, the ultimate goal of mining $\mathcal{D}$ is not an analysis of the dataset \emph{per se}, but the understanding of the underlying process that generated it. Specifically, in many applications $\mathcal{D}$ is a collection of samples obtained from an unknown probability distribution $\pi$ on transactions, and by extracting the FIs in $\mathcal{D}$ one attempts to infer itemsets that are frequently (i.e., with probability at least $\theta$) generated by $\pi$, which we call the True Frequent Itemsets (TFIs). Due to the inherently stochastic nature of the generative process, the set of FIs is only a rough approximation of the set of TFIs, as it often contains a huge number of \emph{false positives}, i.e., spurious itemsets that are not among the TFIs. In this work we design and analyze an algorithm to identify a threshold $\hat{\theta}$ such that the collection of itemsets with frequency at least $\hat{\theta}$ in $\mathcal{D}$ contains only TFIs with probability at least $1-\delta$, for some user-specified $\delta$. Our method uses results from statistical learning theory involving the (empirical) VC-dimension of the problem at hand. This allows us to identify almost all the TFIs without including any false positive. We also experimentally compare our method with the direct mining of $\mathcal{D}$ at frequency $\theta$ and with techniques based on widely-used standard bounds (i.e., the Chernoff bounds) of the binomial distribution, and show that our algorithm outperforms these methods and achieves even better results than what is guaranteed by the theoretical analysis.Comment: 13 pages, Extended version of work appeared in SIAM International Conference on Data Mining, 201

Object Discovery From a Single Unlabeled Image by Mining Frequent Itemset With Multi-scale Features

TThe goal of our work is to discover dominant objects in a very general setting where only a single unlabeled image is given. This is far more challenge than typical co-localization or weakly-supervised localization tasks. To tackle this problem, we propose a simple but effective pattern mining-based method, called Object Location Mining (OLM), which exploits the advantages of data mining and feature representation of pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Specifically, we first convert the feature maps from a pre-trained CNN model into a set of transactions, and then discovers frequent patterns from transaction database through pattern mining techniques. We observe that those discovered patterns, i.e., co-occurrence highlighted regions, typically hold appearance and spatial consistency. Motivated by this observation, we can easily discover and localize possible objects by merging relevant meaningful patterns. Extensive experiments on a variety of benchmarks demonstrate that OLM achieves competitive localization performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods. We also evaluate our approach compared with unsupervised saliency detection methods and achieves competitive results on seven benchmark datasets. Moreover, we conduct experiments on fine-grained classification to show that our proposed method can locate the entire object and parts accurately, which can benefit to improving the classification results significantly

Generating ordered list of Recommended Items: a Hybrid Recommender System of Microblog

Precise recommendation of followers helps in improving the user experience and maintaining the prosperity of twitter and microblog platforms. In this paper, we design a hybrid recommender system of microblog as a solution of KDD Cup 2012, track 1 task, which requires predicting users a user might follow in Tencent Microblog. We describe the background of the problem and present the algorithm consisting of keyword analysis, user taxonomy, (potential)interests extraction and item recommendation. Experimental result shows the high performance of our algorithm. Some possible improvements are discussed, which leads to further study.Comment: 7 page

Query-Driven Sampling for Collective Entity Resolution

Probabilistic databases play a preeminent role in the processing and management of uncertain data. Recently, many database research efforts have integrated probabilistic models into databases to support tasks such as information extraction and labeling. Many of these efforts are based on batch oriented inference which inhibits a realtime workflow. One important task is entity resolution (ER). ER is the process of determining records (mentions) in a database that correspond to the same real-world entity. Traditional pairwise ER methods can lead to inconsistencies and low accuracy due to localized decisions. Leading ER systems solve this problem by collectively resolving all records using a probabilistic graphical model and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) inference. However, for large datasets this is an extremely expensive process. One key observation is that, such exhaustive ER process incurs a huge up-front cost, which is wasteful in practice because most users are interested in only a small subset of entities. In this paper, we advocate pay-as-you-go entity resolution by developing a number of query-driven collective ER techniques. We introduce two classes of SQL queries that involve ER operators --- selection-driven ER and join-driven ER. We implement novel variations of the MCMC Metropolis Hastings algorithm to generate biased samples and selectivity-based scheduling algorithms to support the two classes of ER queries. Finally, we show that query-driven ER algorithms can converge and return results within minutes over a database populated with the extraction from a newswire dataset containing 71 million mentions