40,576 research outputs found
A Recurrent Neural Network Survival Model: Predicting Web User Return Time
The size of a website's active user base directly affects its value. Thus, it
is important to monitor and influence a user's likelihood to return to a site.
Essential to this is predicting when a user will return. Current state of the
art approaches to solve this problem come in two flavors: (1) Recurrent Neural
Network (RNN) based solutions and (2) survival analysis methods. We observe
that both techniques are severely limited when applied to this problem.
Survival models can only incorporate aggregate representations of users instead
of automatically learning a representation directly from a raw time series of
user actions. RNNs can automatically learn features, but can not be directly
trained with examples of non-returning users who have no target value for their
return time. We develop a novel RNN survival model that removes the limitations
of the state of the art methods. We demonstrate that this model can
successfully be applied to return time prediction on a large e-commerce dataset
with a superior ability to discriminate between returning and non-returning
users than either method applied in isolation.Comment: Accepted into ECML PKDD 2018; 8 figures and 1 tabl
SAFE: A Neural Survival Analysis Model for Fraud Early Detection
Many online platforms have deployed anti-fraud systems to detect and prevent
fraudulent activities. However, there is usually a gap between the time that a
user commits a fraudulent action and the time that the user is suspended by the
platform. How to detect fraudsters in time is a challenging problem. Most of
the existing approaches adopt classifiers to predict fraudsters given their
activity sequences along time. The main drawback of classification models is
that the prediction results between consecutive timestamps are often
inconsistent. In this paper, we propose a survival analysis based fraud early
detection model, SAFE, which maps dynamic user activities to survival
probabilities that are guaranteed to be monotonically decreasing along time.
SAFE adopts recurrent neural network (RNN) to handle user activity sequences
and directly outputs hazard values at each timestamp, and then, survival
probability derived from hazard values is deployed to achieve consistent
predictions. Because we only observe the user suspended time instead of the
fraudulent activity time in the training data, we revise the loss function of
the regular survival model to achieve fraud early detection. Experimental
results on two real world datasets demonstrate that SAFE outperforms both the
survival analysis model and recurrent neural network model alone as well as
state-of-the-art fraud early detection approaches.Comment: To appear in AAAI-201
The R Package JMbayes for Fitting Joint Models for Longitudinal and Time-to-Event Data using MCMC
Joint models for longitudinal and time-to-event data constitute an attractive
modeling framework that has received a lot of interest in the recent years.
This paper presents the capabilities of the R package JMbayes for fitting these
models under a Bayesian approach using Markon chain Monte Carlo algorithms.
JMbayes can fit a wide range of joint models, including among others joint
models for continuous and categorical longitudinal responses, and provides
several options for modeling the association structure between the two
outcomes. In addition, this package can be used to derive dynamic predictions
for both outcomes, and offers several tools to validate these predictions in
terms of discrimination and calibration. All these features are illustrated
using a real data example on patients with primary biliary cirrhosis.Comment: 42 pages, 6 figure
From Micro to Macro: Uncovering and Predicting Information Cascading Process with Behavioral Dynamics
Cascades are ubiquitous in various network environments. How to predict these
cascades is highly nontrivial in several vital applications, such as viral
marketing, epidemic prevention and traffic management. Most previous works
mainly focus on predicting the final cascade sizes. As cascades are typical
dynamic processes, it is always interesting and important to predict the
cascade size at any time, or predict the time when a cascade will reach a
certain size (e.g. an threshold for outbreak). In this paper, we unify all
these tasks into a fundamental problem: cascading process prediction. That is,
given the early stage of a cascade, how to predict its cumulative cascade size
of any later time? For such a challenging problem, how to understand the micro
mechanism that drives and generates the macro phenomenons (i.e. cascading
proceese) is essential. Here we introduce behavioral dynamics as the micro
mechanism to describe the dynamic process of a node's neighbors get infected by
a cascade after this node get infected (i.e. one-hop subcascades). Through
data-driven analysis, we find out the common principles and patterns lying in
behavioral dynamics and propose a novel Networked Weibull Regression model for
behavioral dynamics modeling. After that we propose a novel method for
predicting cascading processes by effectively aggregating behavioral dynamics,
and propose a scalable solution to approximate the cascading process with a
theoretical guarantee. We extensively evaluate the proposed method on a large
scale social network dataset. The results demonstrate that the proposed method
can significantly outperform other state-of-the-art baselines in multiple tasks
including cascade size prediction, outbreak time prediction and cascading
process prediction.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figure
Irreversible Investment, Real Options, and Competition: Evidence from Real Estate Development
We examine the extent to which uncertainty delays investment and the effect of competition on this relationship using a sample of 1,214 condominium developments in Vancouver, Canada built from 1979-1998. We find that increases in both idiosyncratic and systematic risk lead developers to delay new real estate investments. Empirically, a one-standard deviation increase in the return volatility reduces the probability of investment by 13 percent, equivalent to a 9 percent decline in real prices. Increases in the number of potential competitors located near a project negate the negative relationship between idiosyncratic risk and development. These results support models in which competition erodes option values and provide clear evidence for the real options framework over alternatives such as simple risk aversion.
Seismic Vulnerability of the Italian Roadway Bridge Stock
This study focuses on the seismic vulnerability evaluation of the Italian roadway bridge stock, within the framework of a Civil Protection sponsored project. A comprehensive database of existing bridges (17,000 bridges with different level of knowledge) was implemented. At the core of the study stands a procedure for automatically carrying out state-of-the-art analytical evaluation of fragility curves for two performance levels – damage and collapse – on an individual bridge basis. A webGIS was developed to handle data and results. The main outputs are maps of bridge seismic risk (from the fragilities and the hazard maps) at the national level and real-time scenario damage-probability maps (from the fragilities and the scenario shake maps). In the latter case the webGIS also performs network analysis to identify routes to be followed by rescue teams. Consistency of the fragility derivation over the entire bridge stock is regarded as a major advantage of the adopted approach
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