Identifying Parkinson’s Patients: A Functional Gradient Boosting Approach

Parkinson’s, a progressive neural disorder, is difficult to identify due to the hidden nature of the symptoms associated. We present a machine learning approach that uses a definite set of features obtained from the Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI) study as input and classifies them into one of two classes: PD (Parkinson’s disease) and HC (Healthy Control). As far as we know this is the first work in applying machine learning algorithms for classifying patients with Parkinson’s disease with the involvement of domain expert during the feature selection process. We evaluate our approach on 1194 patients acquired from Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative and show that it achieves a state-of-the-art performance with minimal feature engineering

Representing Concepts by Weighted Formulas

A concept is traditionally defined via the necessary and sufficient conditions that clearly determine its extension. By contrast, cognitive views of concepts intend to account for empirical data that show that categorisation under a concept presents typicality effects and a certain degree of indeterminacy. We propose a formal language to compactly represent concepts by leveraging on weighted logical formulas. In this way, we can model the possible synergies among the qualities that are relevant for categorising an object under a concept. We show that our proposal can account for a number of views of concepts such as the prototype theory and the exemplar theory. Moreover, we show how the proposed model can overcome some limitations of cognitive views

ACORA: Distribution-Based Aggregation for Relational Learning from Identifier Attributes

Feature construction through aggregation plays an essential role in modeling relational domains with one-to-many relationships between tables. One-to-many relationships lead to bags (multisets) of related entities, from which predictive information must be captured. This paper focuses on aggregation from categorical attributes that can take many values (e.g., object identifiers). We present a novel aggregation method as part of a relational learning system ACORA, that combines the use of vector distance and meta-data about the class-conditional distributions of attribute values. We provide a theoretical foundation for this approach deriving a "relational fixed-effect" model within a Bayesian framework, and discuss the implications of identifier aggregation on the expressive power of the induced model. One advantage of using identifier attributes is the circumvention of limitations caused either by missing/unobserved object properties or by independence assumptions. Finally, we show empirically that the novel aggregators can generalize in the presence of identi- fier (and other high-dimensional) attributes, and also explore the limitations of the applicability of the methods.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

Transaction Fraud Detection via Spatial-Temporal-Aware Graph Transformer

How to obtain informative representations of transactions and then perform the identification of fraudulent transactions is a crucial part of ensuring financial security. Recent studies apply Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to the transaction fraud detection problem. Nevertheless, they encounter challenges in effectively learning spatial-temporal information due to structural limitations. Moreover, few prior GNN-based detectors have recognized the significance of incorporating global information, which encompasses similar behavioral patterns and offers valuable insights for discriminative representation learning. Therefore, we propose a novel heterogeneous graph neural network called Spatial-Temporal-Aware Graph Transformer (STA-GT) for transaction fraud detection problems. Specifically, we design a temporal encoding strategy to capture temporal dependencies and incorporate it into the graph neural network framework, enhancing spatial-temporal information modeling and improving expressive ability. Furthermore, we introduce a transformer module to learn local and global information. Pairwise node-node interactions overcome the limitation of the GNN structure and build up the interactions with the target node and long-distance ones. Experimental results on two financial datasets compared to general GNN models and GNN-based fraud detectors demonstrate that our proposed method STA-GT is effective on the transaction fraud detection task