Joint Fusion Learning of Multiple Time Series Prediction

Accurate traffic density estimations is essential for numerous purposes like the developing successful transit policies or to forecast future traffic conditions for navigation. Current developments in the machine learning and computer systems bring the transportation industry numerous possibilities to improve their operations using data analyses on traffic flow sensor data . However, even state-of-art algorithms for time series forecasting perform well on some transportation problems, they still fail to solve some critical tasks. In particular, existing traffic flow forecasting methods that are not utilising causality relations between different data sources are still unsatisfying for many real-world applications . In this report, we have focused on a new method named joint fusion learning that uses underlying causality in time series. We test our method in a very detailed synthetic environment that we specially developed to imitate real-world traffic flow dataset. In the end, we use our joint-fusion learning on a historical traffic flow dataset for Thessaloniki, Greece which is published by Hellenic Institute of Transport (HIT) . We obtained better results on the short-term forecasts compared the widely-used benchmarks models that uses single time series to forecast the future

Time Interval-enhanced Graph Neural Network for Shared-account Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation

Shared-account Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation (SCSR) task aims to recommend the next item via leveraging the mixed user behaviors in multiple domains. It is gaining immense research attention as more and more users tend to sign up on different platforms and share accounts with others to access domain-specific services. Existing works on SCSR mainly rely on mining sequential patterns via Recurrent Neural Network (RNN)-based models, which suffer from the following limitations: 1) RNN-based methods overwhelmingly target discovering sequential dependencies in single-user behaviors. They are not expressive enough to capture the relationships among multiple entities in SCSR. 2) All existing methods bridge two domains via knowledge transfer in the latent space, and ignore the explicit cross-domain graph structure. 3) None existing studies consider the time interval information among items, which is essential in the sequential recommendation for characterizing different items and learning discriminative representations for them. In this work, we propose a new graph-based solution, namely TiDA-GCN, to address the above challenges. Specifically, we first link users and items in each domain as a graph. Then, we devise a domain-aware graph convolution network to learn userspecific node representations. To fully account for users' domainspecific preferences on items, two effective attention mechanisms are further developed to selectively guide the message passing process. Moreover, to further enhance item- and account-level representation learning, we incorporate the time interval into the message passing, and design an account-aware self-attention module for learning items' interactive characteristics. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method from various aspects.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figure

Fighting Rumours on Social Media

With the advance of social platforms, people are sharing contents in an unprecedented scale. This makes social platforms an ideal place for spreading rumors. As rumors may have negative impacts on the real world, many rumor detection techniques have been proposed. In this proposal, we summarize several works that focus on two important steps of rumor detection. The first step involves detecting controversial events from the data streams which are candidates for rumors. The aim of the second step is to find out the truth values of these events i.e. whether they are rumors or not. Although some techniques are able to achieve state-of-the-art results, they do not cope well with the streaming nature of social platforms. In addition, they usually leverage only one type of information available on social platforms such as only the posts. To overcome these limitations, we propose two research directions that emphasize on 1) detecting rumors in a progressive manner and 2) combining different types of information for better detection

Diversifying Group Recommendation

Recommender-systems has been a significant research direction in both literature and practice. The core of recommender systems are the recommendation mechanisms, which suggest to a user a selected set of items supposed to match user true intent, based on existing user preferences. In some scenarios, the items to be recommended are not intended for personal use but a group of users. Group recommendation is rather more since group members have wide-ranging levels of interests and often involve conflicts. However, group recommendation endures the over-specification problem, in which the presumingly relevant items do not necessarily match true user intent. In this paper, we address the problem of diversity in group recommendation by improving the chance of returning at least one piece of information that embraces group satisfaction. We proposed a bounded algorithm that finds a subset of items with maximal group utility and maximal variety of information. Experiments on real-world rating datasets show the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach

Exploring Data Partitions for What-if Analysis

What-if analysis is a data-intensive exploration to inspect how changes in a set of input parameters of a model influence some outcomes. It is motivated by a user trying to understand the sensitivity of a model to a certain parameter in order to reach a set of goals that are defined over the outcomes. To avoid an exploration of all possible combinations of parameter values, efficient what-if analysis calls for a partitioning of parameter values into data ranges and a unified representation of the obtained outcomes per range. Traditional techniques to capture data ranges, such as histograms, are limited to one outcome dimension. Yet, in practice, what-if analysis often involves conflicting goals that are defined over different dimensions of the outcome. Working on each of those goals independently cannot capture the inherent trade-off between them. In this paper, we propose techniques to recommend data ranges for what-if analysis, which capture not only data regularities, but also the trade-off between conflicting goals. Specifically, we formulate a parametric data partitioning problem and propose a method to find an optimal solution for it. Targeting scalability to large datasets, we further provide a heuristic solution to this problem. By theoretical and empirical analyses, we establish performance guarantees in terms of runtime and result quality

User Guidance for Efficient Fact Checking

The Web constitutes a valuable source of information. In recent years, it fostered the construction of large-scale knowledge bases, such as Freebase, YAGO, and DBpedia. The open nature of the Web, with content potentially being generated by everyone, however, leads to inaccuracies and misinformation. Construction and maintenance of a knowledge base thus has to rely on fact checking, an assessment of the credibility of facts. Due to an inherent lack of ground truth information, such fact checking cannot be done in a purely automated manner, but requires human involvement. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive framework to guide users in the validation of facts, striving for a minimisation of the invested effort. Our framework is grounded in a novel probabilistic model that combines user input with automated credibility inference. Based thereon, we show how to guide users in fact checking by identifying the facts for which validation is most beneficial. Moreover, our framework includes techniques to reduce the manual effort invested in fact checking by determining when to stop the validation and by supporting efficient batching strategies. We further show how to handle fact checking in a streaming setting. Our experiments with three real-world datasets demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our framework: A knowledge base of high quality, with a precision of above 90\%, is constructed with only a half of the validation effort required by baseline techniques