Modeling The Intensity Function Of Point Process Via Recurrent Neural Networks

Event sequence, asynchronously generated with random timestamp, is ubiquitous among applications. The precise and arbitrary timestamp can carry important clues about the underlying dynamics, and has lent the event data fundamentally different from the time-series whereby series is indexed with fixed and equal time interval. One expressive mathematical tool for modeling event is point process. The intensity functions of many point processes involve two components: the background and the effect by the history. Due to its inherent spontaneousness, the background can be treated as a time series while the other need to handle the history events. In this paper, we model the background by a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) with its units aligned with time series indexes while the history effect is modeled by another RNN whose units are aligned with asynchronous events to capture the long-range dynamics. The whole model with event type and timestamp prediction output layers can be trained end-to-end. Our approach takes an RNN perspective to point process, and models its background and history effect. For utility, our method allows a black-box treatment for modeling the intensity which is often a pre-defined parametric form in point processes. Meanwhile end-to-end training opens the venue for reusing existing rich techniques in deep network for point process modeling. We apply our model to the predictive maintenance problem using a log dataset by more than 1000 ATMs from a global bank headquartered in North America.Comment: Accepted at Thirty-First AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI17

MUFFLE: Multi-Modal Fake News Influence Estimator on Twitter

To alleviate the impact of fake news on our society, predicting the popularity of fake news posts on social media is a crucial problem worthy of study. However, most related studies on fake news emphasize detection only. In this paper, we focus on the issue of fake news influence prediction, i.e., inferring how popular a fake news post might become on social platforms. To achieve our goal, we propose a comprehensive framework, MUFFLE, which captures multi-modal dynamics by encoding the representation of news-related social networks, user characteristics, and content in text. The attention mechanism developed in the model can provide explainability for social or psychological analysis. To examine the effectiveness of MUFFLE, we conducted extensive experiments on real-world datasets. The experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms both state-of-the-art methods of popularity prediction and machine-based baselines in top-k NDCG and hit rate. Through the experiments, we also analyze the feature importance for predicting fake news influence via the explainability provided by MUFFLE

A technical perspective on integrating artificial intelligence to solid-state welding

The implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques in industrial applications, especially solid-state welding (SSW), has transformed modeling, optimization, forecasting, and controlling sophisticated systems. SSW is a better method for joining due to the least melting of material thus maintaining Nugget region integrity. This study investigates thoroughly how AI-based predictions have impacted SSW by looking at methods like Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), Fuzzy Logic (FL), Machine Learning (ML), Meta-Heuristic Algorithms, and Hybrid Methods (HM) as applied to Friction Stir Welding (FSW), Ultrasonic Welding (UW), and Diffusion Bonding (DB). Studies on Diffusion Bonding reveal that ANN and Generic Algorithms can predict outcomes with an accuracy range of 85 – 99%, while Response Surface Methodology such as Optimization Strategy can achieve up to 95 percent confidence levels in improving bonding strength and optimizing process parameters. Using ANNs for FSW gives an average percentage error of about 95%, but using metaheuristics refined it at an incrementally improved accuracy rate of about 2%. In UW, ANN, Hybrid ANN, and ML models predict output parameters with accuracy levels ranging from 85 to 96%. Integrating AI techniques with optimization algorithms, for instance, GA and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) significantly improves accuracy, enhancing parameter prediction and optimizing UW processes. ANN’s high accuracy of nearly 95% compared to other techniques like FL and ML in predicting welding parameters. HM exhibits superior precision, showcasing their potential to enhance weld quality, minimize trial welds, and reduce costs and time. Various emerging hybrid methods offer better prediction accuracy

MCDAN: a Multi-scale Context-enhanced Dynamic Attention Network for Diffusion Prediction

Information diffusion prediction aims at predicting the target users in the information diffusion path on social networks. Prior works mainly focus on the observed structure or sequence of cascades, trying to predict to whom this cascade will be infected passively. In this study, we argue that user intent understanding is also a key part of information diffusion prediction. We thereby propose a novel Multi-scale Context-enhanced Dynamic Attention Network (MCDAN) to predict which user will most likely join the observed current cascades. Specifically, to consider the global interactive relationship among users, we take full advantage of user friendships and global cascading relationships, which are extracted from the social network and historical cascades, respectively. To refine the model's ability to understand the user's preference for the current cascade, we propose a multi-scale sequential hypergraph attention module to capture the dynamic preference of users at different time scales. Moreover, we design a contextual attention enhancement module to strengthen the interaction of user representations within the current cascade. Finally, to engage the user's own susceptibility, we construct a susceptibility label for each user based on user susceptibility analysis and use the rank of this label for auxiliary prediction. We conduct experiments over four widely used datasets and show that MCDAN significantly overperforms the state-of-the-art models. The average improvements are up to 10.61% in terms of Hits@100 and 9.71% in terms of MAP@100, respectively