Pure Spectral Graph Embeddings: Reinterpreting Graph Convolution for Top-N Recommendation

The use of graph convolution in the development of recommender system algorithms has recently achieved state-of-the-art results in the collaborative filtering task (CF). While it has been demonstrated that the graph convolution operation is connected to a filtering operation on the graph spectral domain, the theoretical rationale for why this leads to higher performance on the collaborative filtering problem remains unknown. The presented work makes two contributions. First, we investigate the effect of using graph convolution throughout the user and item representation learning processes, demonstrating how the latent features learned are pushed from the filtering operation into the subspace spanned by the eigenvectors associated with the highest eigenvalues of the normalised adjacency matrix, and how vectors lying on this subspace are the optimal solutions for an objective function related to the sum of the prediction function over the training data. Then, we present an approach that directly leverages the eigenvectors to emulate the solution obtained through graph convolution, eliminating the requirement for a time-consuming gradient descent training procedure while also delivering higher performance on three real-world datasets

Improving explainable recommendations by deep review-based explanations

Many e-commerce sites encourage their users to write product reviews, in the knowledge that they exert a considerable influence on users’ decision-making processes. These snippets of real-world experience provide an essential source of data for interpretable recommendations. However, current methods relying on user-generated content to make recommendations can run into problems because of well-known issues with reviews, such as noise, sparsity and irrelevant content. On the other hand, recent advances in text generation methods demonstrate significant text quality improvements and show promise in their ability to address these problems. In this paper, we develop two character-level deep neural network-based personalised review generation models, and improve recommendation accuracy by generating high-quality text which meets the input criteria of text-aware recommender systems. To make fair comparisons, we train review-aware recommender systems by human written reviews and attain advanced recommendations by feeding generated reviews at the inference step. Our experiments are conducted on four large review datasets from multiple domains. We leverage our methods’ performance by comparing with non-review based recommender systems and advanced review-aware recommender systems. The results demonstrate that we beat baselines on a range of metrics and obtain state-of-the-art performance on both rating prediction and top- N ranking. Our sparsity experiments validate that our generation models can produce high-quality text to tackle the sparsity problem. We also demonstrate the generation of useful reviews so that we can achieve up to 13.53% RMSE improvements. For explanation evaluation, quantitative analyses reveal good understandable scores for our generated review-based explanations, and qualitative case studies substantiate we can capture critical aspects in generating explanations.Science Foundation IrelandInsight Research Centre2021-06-14 JG: broken PDF replace

Stratification structure of urban habitats

This paper explores the community structure of a network of significant locations in cities as observed from location-based social network data. We present the findings of this analysis at multiple spatial scales. While there is previously observed distinct spatial structure at inter-city level, in a form of catchment areas and functional regions, the exploration of in-city scales provides novel insights. We present the evidence that particular areas in cities stratify into distinct “habitats” of frequently visited locations, featuring both spatially overlapping and disjoint regions. We then quantify this stratification with normalized mutual information which shows different stratification levels for different cities. Our findings have important implications for advancing models of human mobility, studying social exclusion and segregation processes in cities, and are also of interest for geomarketing analysts developing fidelity schemes and promotional programmes

FewSOME: One-Class Few Shot Anomaly Detection with Siamese Networks

Recent Anomaly Detection techniques have progressed the field considerably but at the cost of increasingly complex training pipelines. Such techniques require large amounts of training data, resulting in computationally expensive algorithms that are unsuitable for settings where only a small amount of normal samples are available for training. We propose 'Few Shot anOMaly detection' (FewSOME), a deep One-Class Anomaly Detection algorithm with the ability to accurately detect anomalies having trained on 'few' examples of the normal class and no examples of the anomalous class. We describe FewSOME to be of low complexity given its low data requirement and short training time. FewSOME is aided by pretrained weights with an architecture based on Siamese Networks. By means of an ablation study, we demonstrate how our proposed loss, 'Stop Loss', improves the robustness of FewSOME. Our experiments demonstrate that FewSOME performs at state-of-the-art level on benchmark datasets MNIST, CIFAR-10, F-MNIST and MVTec AD while training on only 30 normal samples, a minute fraction of the data that existing methods are trained on. Moreover, our experiments show FewSOME to be robust to contaminated datasets. We also report F1 score and balanced accuracy in addition to AUC as a benchmark for future techniques to be compared against. Code available; https://github.com/niamhbelton/FewSOME

Geometry of Empty Space is the Key to Near-Arrest Dynamics

We study several examples of kinetically constrained lattice models using dynamically accessible volume as an order parameter. Thereby we identify two distinct regimes exhibiting dynamical slowing, with a sharp threshold between them. These regimes are identified both by a new response function in dynamically available volume, as well as directly in the dynamics. Results for the selfdiffusion constant in terms of the connected hole density are presented, and some evidence is given for scaling in the limit of dynamical arrest.Comment: 11 page

Generating Personalised and Opinionated Review Summaries

Abstract. This paper describes a novel approach for summarising usergenerated reviews for the purpose of explaining recommendations. We demonstrate our approach using TripAdvisor reviews

Item Graph Convolution Collaborative Filtering for Inductive Recommendations

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) have been recently employed as core component in the construction of recommender system algorithms, interpreting user-item interactions as the edges of a bipartite graph. However, in the absence of side information, the majority of existing models adopt an approach of randomly initialising the user embeddings and optimising them throughout the training process. This strategy makes these algorithms inherently transductive, curtailing their ability to generate predictions for users that were unseen at training time. To address this issue, we propose a convolution-based algorithm, which is inductive from the user perspective, while at the same time, depending only on implicit user-item interaction data. We propose the construction of an item-item graph through a weighted projection of the bipartite interaction network and to employ convolution to inject higher order associations into item embeddings, while constructing user representations as weighted sums of the items with which they have interacted. Despite not training individual embeddings for each user our approach achieves state of-the-art recommendation performance with respect to transductive baselines on four real-world datasets, showing at the same time robust inductive performance

Can We Transfer Noise Patterns? An Multi-environment Spectrum Analysis Model Using Generated Cases

Spectrum analysis systems in online water quality testing are designed to detect types and concentrations of pollutants and enable regulatory agencies to respond promptly to pollution incidents. However, spectral data-based testing devices suffer from complex noise patterns when deployed in non-laboratory environments. To make the analysis model applicable to more environments, we propose a noise patterns transferring model, which takes the spectrum of standard water samples in different environments as cases and learns the differences in their noise patterns, thus enabling noise patterns to transfer to unknown samples. Unfortunately, the inevitable sample-level baseline noise makes the model unable to obtain the paired data that only differ in dataset-level environmental noise. To address the problem, we generate a sample-to-sample case-base to exclude the interference of sample-level noise on dataset-level noise learning, enhancing the system's learning performance. Experiments on spectral data with different background noises demonstrate the good noise-transferring ability of the proposed method against baseline systems ranging from wavelet denoising, deep neural networks, and generative models. From this research, we posit that our method can enhance the performance of DL models by generating high-quality cases. The source code is made publicly available online at https://github.com/Magnomic/CNST

Clarification of the Bootstrap Percolation Paradox

We study the onset of the bootstrap percolation transition as a model of generalized dynamical arrest. We develop a new importance-sampling procedure in simulation, based on rare events around "holes", that enables us to access bootstrap lengths beyond those previously studied. By framing a new theory in terms of paths or processes that lead to emptying of the lattice we are able to develop systematic corrections to the existing theory, and compare them to simulations. Thereby, for the first time in the literature, it is possible to obtain credible comparisons between theory and simulation in the accessible density range.Comment: 4 pages with 3 figure