Trajectory prediction in multi-agent sports scenarios is inherently challenging due to the structural heterogeneity across agent roles (e.g., players vs. ball) and dynamic distribution gaps across different sports domains. Existing unified frameworks often fail to capture these structured distributional shifts, resulting in suboptimal generalization across roles and domains. We propose AdaSports-Traj, an adaptive trajectory modeling framework that explicitly addresses both intra-domain and inter-domain distribution discrepancies in sports. At its core, AdaSports-Traj incorporates a Role- and Domain-Aware Adapter to conditionally adjust latent representations based on agent identity and domain context. Additionally, we introduce a Hierarchical Contrastive Learning objective, which separately supervises role-sensitive and domain-aware representations to encourage disentangled latent structures without introducing optimization conflict. Experiments on three diverse sports datasets, BasketballU, Football-U, and Soccer-U, demonstrate the effectiveness of our adaptive design, achieving strong performance in both unified and cross-domain trajectory prediction settings.

Unsupervised multivariate time series (MTS) representation learning aims to extract compact and informative representations from raw sequences without relying on labels, enabling efficient transfer to diverse downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose Dual-Masked Autoencoder (DMAE), a novel masked time-series modeling framework for unsupervised MTS representation learning. DMAE formulates two complementary pretext tasks: (1) reconstructing masked values based on visible attributes, and (2) estimating latent representations of masked features, guided by a teacher encoder. To further improve representation quality, we introduce a feature-level alignment constraint that encourages the predicted latent representations to align with the teacher's outputs. By jointly optimizing these objectives, DMAE learns temporally coherent and semantically rich representations. Comprehensive evaluations across classification, regression, and forecasting tasks demonstrate that our approach achieves consistent and superior performance over competitive baselines.

Video anomaly detection (VAD) aims at identifying unusual behaviors from videos. Most of the existing video anomaly detection methods can achieve promising performance in the scenarios where training and test samples are drawn from the same distribution. In real-world situation, however, it is intractable to collect and label sufficient training video samples that cover many possible test scenarios, and existing methods demonstrate limited generalization ability. Focusing on this issue, we present the few-shot cross-domain video anomaly detection (FC-VAD) problem, which aims to adapt anomaly detection model to target samples, with access to only a few target video frames. To solve the FC-VAD problem, we propose an adaptive video anomaly detection framework named Ada-VAD, which contains a pretraining stage and an adaptation stage. In the pretraining stage, we synthesize abnormal samples and design a self-supervision based prediction task to pretrain a domain invariant model. In the adaptation stage, we adapt the pre-trained model to target domain with few-shot samples by mitigating the distribution shift with an adversarial training approach. We conduct extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, and results show that our Ada-VAD approach outperforms the state-of-the-art VAD methods in most cases. Our code is available at https://github.com/donglgcn/ADA-VAD

Vision-language models, pre-trained on web-scale datasets, have the potential to greatly enhance the intelligence of web applications (e.g., search engines, chatbots, and art tools). Precisely, these models align disparate domains into a co-embedding space, achieving impressive zero-shot performance on multi-modal tasks (e.g., image-text retrieval, VQA). However, existing methods often rely on well-prepared data that less frequently contain noise and variability encountered in real-world scenarios, leading to severe performance drops in handling out-of-distribution (OOD) samples. This work first comprehensively analyzes the performance drop between in-distribution (ID) and OOD retrieval. Based on empirical observations, we introduce a novel approach, Evidential Language-Image Posterior (ELIP), to achieve robust alignment between web images and semantic knowledge across various OOD cases by leveraging evidential uncertainties. The proposed ELIP can be seamlessly integrated into general image-text contrastive learning frameworks, providing an efficient fine-tuning approach without exacerbating the need for additional data. To validate the effectiveness of ELIP, we systematically design a series of OOD cases (e.g., image distortion, spelling errors, and a combination of both) on two benchmark datasets to mimic noisy data in real-world web applications. Our experimental results demonstrate that ELIP improves the performance and robustness of mainstream pre-trained vision-language models facing OOD samples in image-text retrieval tasks.

Anomaly detection is a foundational yet difficult problem in machine learning. In this work, we propose a new and effective framework, dubbed as SLA2P, for unsupervised anomaly detection. Following the extraction of delegate embeddings from raw data, we implement random projections on the features and consider features transformed by disparate projections as being associated with separate pseudo-classes. We then train a neural network for classification on these transformed features to conduct self-supervised learning. Subsequently, we introduce adversarial disturbances to the modified attributes, and we develop anomaly scores built on the classifier's predictive uncertainties concerning these disrupted features. Our approach is motivated by the fact that as anomalies are relatively rare and decentralized, 1) the training of the pseudo-label classifier concentrates more on acquiring the semantic knowledge of regular data instead of anomalous data; 2) the altered attributes of the normal data exhibit greater resilience to disturbances compared to those of the anomalous data. Therefore, the disrupted modified attributes of anomalies can not be well classified and correspondingly tend to attain lesser anomaly scores. The results of experiments on various benchmark datasets for images, text, and inherently tabular data demonstrate that SLA2P achieves state-of-the-art performance consistently.

Adaptive gradient methods, e.g., ADAM, have achieved tremendous success in data-driven machine learning, especially deep learning. Employing adaptive learning rates according to the gradients, such methods are able to attain rapid training of modern deep neural networks. Nevertheless, they are observed to suffer from compromised generalization capacity compared with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and tend to be trapped in local minima at an early stage during the training process. Intriguingly, we discover that the issue can be resolved by substituting the gradient in the second raw moment estimate term with its exponential moving average version in ADAM. The intuition is that the gradient with momentum contains more accurate directional information, and therefore its second-moment estimation is a more preferable option for learning rate scaling than that of the raw gradient. Thereby we propose ADAM$^{3}$ as a new optimizer reaching the goal of training quickly while generalizing much better. Extensive experiments on a variety of tasks and models demonstrate that ADAM$^{3}$ exhibits state-of-the-art performance and superior training stability consistently. Considering the simplicity and effectiveness of ADAM$^{3}$, we believe it has the potential to become a new standard method in deep learning. Code is provided at https://github.com/wyzjack/AdaM3.

The issue of detecting face forgeries has garnered significant interest in the field of computer vision, primarily driven by the growing social concerns of indistinguishable deepfake images. One of the primary obstacles encountered in the field of deepfake detection is enhancing the discriminative power of learned features. In this paper, we propose a Concentric Ring Loss (CRL) that aims to promote the learning of compressed intra-class features and separated inter-class features inside a model. Specifically, we apply margin penalties in both Euclidean and angular space separately, which serve to increase the separation between real and fake images. Moreover, we introduce a frequency-aware triplet network with a self-developed sample generation strategy, which provides efficient hard triplets for model training. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our methods over multiple datasets. We show that CRL consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art by a large margin.

In real-world applications, a single instance could have more than one label. To solve this task, multi-label learning methods emerged in recent years. It is a more challenging problem for many reasons, such as complex label correlation, long-tail label distribution, and data shortage. In general, overcoming these challenges and bettering learning performance could be achieved by utilizing more training samples and including label correlations. However, these solutions are expensive and inflexible. Large-scale, well-labeled datasets are difficult to obtain, and building label correlation maps requires task-specific semantic information as prior knowledge. To address these limitations, we propose a general and compact Multi-Label Correlation Learning (MUCO) framework. MUCO explicitly and effectively learns the latent label correlations by updating a label correlation tensor, which provides highly accurate and interpretable prediction results. In addition, a multi-label generative strategy is deployed to handle the long-tail label distribution challenge. It borrows the visual clues from limited samples and synthesizes more diverse samples. All networks in our model are optimized simultaneously. Extensive experiments illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of MUCO. Ablation studies further prove the effectiveness of all the modules.

Anomaly detection is a fundamental yet challenging problem in machine learning due to the lack of label information. In this work, we propose a novel and powerful framework, dubbed as SLA2P, for unsupervised anomaly detection. After extracting representative embeddings from raw data, we apply random projections to the features and regard features transformed by different projections as belonging to distinct pseudo-classes. We then train a classifier network on these transformed features to perform self-supervised learning. Next, we add adversarial perturbation to the transformed features to decrease their softmax scores of the predicted labels and design anomaly scores based on the predictive uncertainties of the classifier on these perturbed features. Our motivation is that because of the relatively small number and the decentralized modes of anomalies, 1) the pseudo label classifier's training concentrates more on learning the semantic information of normal data rather than anomalous data; 2) the transformed features of the normal data are more robust to the perturbations than those of the anomalies. Consequently, the perturbed transformed features of anomalies fail to be classified well and accordingly have lower anomaly scores than those of the normal samples. Extensive experiments on image, text, and inherently tabular benchmark datasets back up our findings and indicate that SLA2 achieves state-of-the-art anomaly detection performance consistently. Our code is made publicly available at https://github.com/wyzjack/SLA2P

Built upon clean/correct labels, semi-supervised domain adaptation (SSDA) is a well-explored task, which, however, may not be easily obtained. This paper considers a challenging but practical scenario, i.e., the noisy SSDA with polluted labels. Specifically, it is observed that abnormal samples appear to have more randomness and inconsistency among the various views. To this end, we have devised an anomaly score function to detect noisy samples based on the similarity of differently augmented instances. The noisy labeled target samples are re-weighted according to such anomaly scores where the abnormal data contribute less to model training. Moreover, pseudo labeling usually suffers from confirmation bias. To remedy it, we have introduced the adversarial disturbance to raise the divergence across differently augmented views. The experimental results on the contaminated SSDA benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method over the baselines in both robustness and accuracy.

Anomaly detection in videos is a significant yet challenging problem. Previous approaches based on deep neural networks employ either reconstruction-based or prediction-based approaches. Nevertheless, existing reconstruction-based methods 1) rely on old-fashioned convolutional autoencoders and are poor at modeling temporal dependency; 2) are prone to overfit the training samples, leading to indistinguishable reconstruction errors of normal and abnormal frames during the inference phase. To address such issues, firstly, we get inspiration from transformer and propose Spatio-Temporal Auto-Trans-Encoder, dubbed as STATE, as a new autoencoder model for enhanced consecutive frame reconstruction. Our STATE is equipped with a specifically designed learnable convolutional attention module for efficient temporal learning and reasoning. Secondly, we put forward a novel reconstruction-based input perturbation technique during testing to further differentiate anomalous frames. With the same perturbation magnitude, the testing reconstruction error of the normal frames lowers more than that of the abnormal frames, which contributes to mitigating the overfitting problem of reconstruction. Owing to the high relevance of the frame abnormality and the objects in the frame, we conduct object-level reconstruction using both the raw frame and the corresponding optical flow patches. Finally, the anomaly score is designed based on the combination of the raw and motion reconstruction errors using perturbed inputs. Extensive experiments on benchmark video anomaly detection datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous reconstruction-based methods by a notable margin, and achieves state-of-the-art anomaly detection performance consistently. The code is available at https://github.com/wyzjack/MRMGA4VAD.

Tabular pre-training models have received increasing attention due to the wide-ranging applications for tabular data analysis. However, most of the existing solutions are directly built upon the tabular data with a mixture of non-semantic and semantic contents. According to the statistics, only 30% of tabular data in wikitables are semantic entities that are surrounded and isolated by enormous irregular characters such as numbers, strings, symbols, etc. Despite the small portion, such semantic entities are crucial for table understanding. This paper attempts to enhance the existing tabular pre-training model by injecting common-sense knowledge from external sources. Compared with the knowledge injection in the natural language pre-training models, the tabular model naturally requires overcoming the domain gaps between external knowledge and tabular data with significant differences in both structures and contents. To this end, we propose the dual-adapters inserted within the pre-trained tabular model for flexible and efficient knowledge injection. The two parallel adapters are trained by the knowledge graph triplets and semantically augmented tables respectively for infusion and alignment with the tabular data. In addition, a path-wise attention layer is attached below to fuse the cross-domain representation with the weighted contribution. Finally, to verify the effectiveness of our proposed knowledge injection framework, we extensively test it on 5 different application scenarios covering both zero-shot and finetuning-based tabular understanding tasks over the cell, column, and tables levels.

Analysis of indoor spaces requires topological information. In this paper, we propose to extract topological information from room attributes using what we call Iterative and adaptive graph Topology Learning (ITL). ITL progressively predicts multiple relations between rooms; at each iteration, it improves node embeddings, which in turn facilitates the generation of a better topological graph structure. This notion of iterative improvement of node embeddings and topological graph structure is in the same spirit as [5]. However, while [5] computes the adjacency matrix based on node similarity, we learn the graph metric using a relational decoder to extract room correlations. Experiments using a new challenging indoor dataset validate our proposed method. Qualitative and quantitative evaluation for layout topology prediction and floorplan generation applications also demonstrate the effectiveness of ITL.

Despite great progress in supervised image recognition, a large performance drop is usually observed when deploying the model in the wild. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods tackle the issue by aligning the source domain and the target domain. However, most existing adversarial based methods attempt to perform the alignment from a holistic view, ignoring the underlying class-level data structure in the target domain. As a result, the representations are distorted by adversarial alignment, leading to a negative transfer. Motivated by this issue, we first claim that this issue can be solved if there exists ‘optimal’ per-sample weights for adversarial alignment, and then devise a meta-learning framework to adaptively learn such adversarial weights. Specifically, we construct a meta-dataset with targetlike distribution as meta knowledge, and use it to guide the learning of the optimal adversarial weights via a meta-learner. By this means, our framework can adaptively adjust the weights of all training samples in adversarial training based on the feedback from meta dataset and thus achieve the categorical-wise domain alignment. We conduct sufficient ablation studies and experiments to show the effectiveness of our approach. Our method is generic to existing domain alignment based methods and could achieve consistently improvements over three UDA classification benchmarks.

Multi-modal time series classification (MTC) uses complementary information from different modalities to improve the learning performance. Obtaining informative modality-specific representation plays an essential role in MTC. Attention mechanism has been widely adopted as an effective strategy for discovering discriminative cues underlying temporal data. However, most existing MTC methods only utilize attention to balance the feature weights within or cross modalities but ignore digging latent patterns from mutual-support information in attention space. Specifically, the attention distributions are different for multiple modalities which are supportive and instructional with each other. To this end, we propose a collaborative attention mechanism (CAM) for MTC based on a novel perspective to utilize attention module. CAM detects the attention differences among multi-modal time series, and adaptively integrates different attention information to benefit each other. We extend the long short-term memory (LSTM) to a Mutual-Aid RNN (MAR) for multi-modal collaboration. CAM takes advantages of modality-specific attention to guide another modality and discover potential information which is hard to be explored by itself. It paves a novel way of employing attention to enhance the capacity of multi-modal representations. Extensive experiments on four multi-modal time series datasets illustrate the CAM effectiveness to improve the single-modal and also boost multi-modal performances.

Multi-label learning recovers multiple labels from a single instance. It is a more challenging task compared with single-label manner. Most multi-label learning approaches need large-scale well-labeled samples to achieve high accurate performance. However, it is expensive to build such a dataset. In this work, we propose a generic multi-label learning framework based on Adaptive Graph and Marginalized Augmentation (AGMA) in a semi-supervised scenario. Generally speaking, AGMA makes use of a small amount of labeled data associated with a lot of unlabeled data to boost the learning performance. First, an adaptive similarity graph is learned to effectively capture the intrinsic structure within the data. Second, marginalized augmentation strategy is explored to enhance the model generalization and robustness. Third, a feature-label autoencoder is further deployed to improve inferring efficiency. All the modules are jointly trained to benefit each other. State-of-the-art benchmarks in both traditional and zero-shot multi-label learning scenarios are evaluated. Experiments and ablation studies illustrate the accuracy and efficiency of our AGMA method.

Aspect-based sentiment classification aims to predict sentimental polarities of one or multiple aspects in texts. As texts always contain a large proportion of task-irrelevant words, accurate alignment between aspects and their sentimental descriptions is the most crucial and challenging step. State-of-the-art approaches are mainly based on word-level attention learned from recurrent neural network variants (e.g., LSTM) or graph neural networks. From another view, these methods essentially weight and aggregate all possible alignments. However, this mechanism heavily relies on large-scale supervision training: without enough labels, it could easily overfit with difficulty in generalization. To address this challenge, we propose SentRL, a reinforcement learning-based framework for aspect-based sentiment classification. In this framework, input texts are transformed into their dependency graphs. Then, an agent is deployed to walk on the graphs, explores paths from target aspect nodes to their potential sentimental regions, and differentiates the effectiveness of different paths. By limiting the agent’s exploration budget, our method encourages the agent to skip task-irrelevant information and focus on the most effective paths for alignment purpose. Our method considerably reduces the impact of task-irrelevant words and improves generalization performance. Compared with competitive baseline methods, our approach achieves the highest performance on public benchmark datasets with up to 3.7% improvement.

Current adversarial adaptation methods attempt to align the cross-domain features, whereas two challenges remain unsolved: 1) the conditional distribution mismatch and 2) the bias of the decision boundary towards the source domain.To solve these challenges, we propose a novel framework for semi-supervised domain adaptation by unifying the learning of opposite structures (UODA).UODA consists of a generator and two classifiers (i.e., the sourcescattering classifier and the target-clustering classifier), which are trained for contradictory purposes.The target-clustering classifier attempts to cluster the target features to improve intra-class density and enlarge inter-class divergence.Meanwhile, the source-scattering classifier is designed to scatter the source features to enhance the decision boundary's smoothness.Through the alternation of source-feature expansion and target-feature clustering procedures, the target features are well-enclosed within the dilated boundary of the corresponding source features.This strategy can make the cross-domain features to be precisely aligned against the source bias simultaneously.Moreover, to overcome the model collapse through training, we progressively update the measurement of feature's distance and their representation via an adversarial training paradigm.Extensive experiments on the benchmarks of DomainNet and Office-home datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach over the state-of-the-art methods.

Cluster analysis and outlier detection are two continuously rising topics in data mining area, which in fact connect to each other deeply. Cluster structure is vulnerable to outliers; inversely, outliers are the points belonging to none of any clusters. Unfortunately, most existing studies do not notice the coupled relationship between these two tasks and handle them separately. In this article, we consider the joint cluster analysis and outlier detection problem, and propose the Clustering with Outlier Removal (COR) algorithm. Specifically, the original space is transformed into a binary space via generating basic partitions. We employ Holoentropy to measure the compactness of each cluster without involving several outlier candidates. To provide a neat and efficient solution, an auxiliary binary matrix is introduced so that COR completely and efficiently solves the challenging problem via a unified K-means— with theoretical supports. Extensive experimental results on numerous data sets in various domains demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of COR significantly over state-of-the-art methods in terms of cluster validity and outlier detection. Some key factors including the basic partition number and generation strategy in COR with an application on abnormal flight trajectory detection are further analyzed for practical use.

High-dimensional time series segmentation aims to segment a long temporal sequence into several short and meaningful subsequences. The high-dimensionality makes it challenging due to the complicated correlations among the sequential features. A large number of labeled data is required in existing supervised methods, and unsupervised methods mainly deploy clustering approaches, which are sensitive to outliers and hard to guarantee high performance. Also, most existing methods mainly rely on hand-craft features to deal with regular time series segmentation and achieve promising results. However, these approaches cannot effectively handle high-dimensional time series and will result in a high computational cost. In our work, we propose a novel unsupervised representation learning framework called Dual-Side Auto-Encoder (DSAE). It mainly focuses on high-dimensional time series segmentation by effectively capturing the temporal correlative patterns. Specifically, a single-to-multiple auto-encoder is designed to capture local sequential information. Besides, a long-shot distance encoding strategy is proposed. It aims to explicitly guide the learning process to obtain distinctive representations for segmentation. Furthermore, the long-short distance strategy is also executed in the decoded feature space, which implicitly directs the representation learning. Substantial experiments on six datasets illustrate the model effectiveness.

The rich and accessible labeled data fueled the revolutionary successes of deep learning in object recognition. However, recognizing objects of novel classes with limited supervision information provided, i.e., Novel Object Recognition (NOR), remains a challenging task. We identify in this paper two key factors for the success of NOR that previous approaches fail to simultaneously guarantee. The first is producing discriminative feature representations for images of novel classes, and the second is generating a flexible classifier readily adapted to novel classes provided with limited supervision signals. To secure both key factors, we propose a framework which decouples a deep classification model into a feature extraction module and a classification module. We learn the former to ensure feature discriminability with a standard multi-class classification task by fully utilizing the competing information among all classes within a training set, and learn the latter to secure adaptability by training a meta-learner network which generates classifier weights whenever provided with minimal supervision information of target classes. Extensive experiments on common benchmark datasets in the settings of both zero-shot and few-shot learning demonstrate our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

The goal of Multi-label learning is to predict multiple labels of each single instance. This is a challenging problem since the training data is limited, long-tail label distribution, and complicated label correlations. Generally, more training samples and label correlation knowledge would benefit the learning performance. However, it is difficult to obtain large-scale well-labeled datasets, and building such a label correlation map requires sophisticated semantic knowledge. To this end, we propose an end-to-end Generative Correlation Discovery Network (GCDN) method for multi-label learning in this paper. GCDN captures the existing data distribution, and synthesizes diverse data to enlarge the diversity of the training features; meanwhile, it also learns the label correlations based on a specifically-designed, simple but effective correlation discovery network to automatically discover the label correlations and considerately improve the label prediction accuracy. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and high accuracy of our approach.

Modeling user behavior from unstructured software log-trace data is critical in providing personalized service (\emphe.g., cross-platform recommendation). Existing user modeling approaches cannot well handle the long-term temporal information in log data, or produce semantically meaningful results for interpreting user logs. To address these challenges, we propose a Log2Intent framework for interpretable user modeling in this paper. Log2Intent adopts a deep sequential modeling framework that contains a temporal encoder, a semantic encoder and a log action decoder, and it fully captures the long-term temporal information in user sessions. Moreover, to bridge the semantic gap between log-trace data and human language, a recurrent semantics memory unit (RSMU) is proposed to encode the annotation sentences from an auxiliary software tutorial dataset, and the output of RSMU is fed into the semantic encoder of Log2Intent. Comprehensive experiments on a real-world Photoshop log-trace dataset with an auxiliary Photoshop tutorial dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed Log2Intent framework over the state-of-the-art log-trace user modeling method in three different tasks, including log annotation retrieval, user interest detection and user next action prediction.

Ensemble Clustering (EC) is an important topic for data cluster analysis. It targets to integrate multiple Basic Partitions (BPs) of a particular dataset into a consensus partition. Among previous works, one promising and effective way is to transform EC as a graph partitioning problem on the co-association matrix, which is a pair-wise similarity matrix summarized by all the BPs in essence. However, most existing EC methods directly utilize the co-association matrix, yet without considering various noises (e.g., the disagreement between different BPs and the outliers) that may exist in it. These noises can impair the cluster structure of a co-association matrix, and thus mislead the final graph partitioning process. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Robust Spectral Ensemble Clustering (RSEC) algorithm in this article. Specifically, we learn low-rank representation (LRR) for the co-association matrix to uncover its cluster structure and handle the noises, and meanwhile, we perform spectral clustering with the learned representation to seek for a consensus partition. These two steps are jointly proceeded within a unified optimization framework. In particular, during the optimizing process, we leverage consensus partition to iteratively enhance the block-diagonal structure of LRR, in order to assist the graph partitioning. To solve RSEC, we first formulate it by using nuclear norm as a convex proxy to the rank function. Then, motivated by the recent advances in non-convex rank minimization, we further develop a non-convex model for RSEC and provide it a solution by the majorization--minimization Augmented Lagrange Multiplier algorithm. Experiments on 18 real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm compared with state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, several impact factors on the clustering performance of our approach are also explored extensively.

Domain adaptation has been a primal approach to addressing the issues by lack of labels in many data mining tasks. Although considerable efforts have been devoted to domain adaptation with promising results, most existing work learns a classifier on a source domain and then predicts the labels for target data, where only the instances near the boundary determine the hyperplane and the whole structure information is ignored. Moreover, little work has been done regarding to multi-source domain adaptation. To that end, we develop a novel unsupervised domain adaptation framework, which ensures the whole structure of source domains is preserved to guide the target structure learning in a semi-supervised clustering fashion. To our knowledge, this is the first time when the domain adaptation problem is re-formulated as a semi-supervised clustering problem with target labels as missing values. Furthermore, by introducing an augmented matrix, a non-trivial solution is designed, which can be exactly mapped into a K-means-like optimization problem with modified distance function and update rule for centroids in an efficient way. Extensive experiments on several widely-used databases show the substantial improvements of our proposed approach over the state-of-the-art methods.

Most of the unsupervised feature selection methods employ pseudo labels generated by clustering to guide the feature selection; however, noisy and irrelevant features degrade the cluster structure, which is ineffective to supervise feature selection. In light of this, we propose the Consensus Guided Unsupervised Feature Selection (CGUFS) framework, which introduces consensus clustering to generate pseudo labels for feature selection. Generally speaking, multiple diverse basic partitions are generated from the data and the consensus clustering is employed to provide the high-quality and robust partition to guide the feature selection in a one-step framework. In addition, complex constraints such as non-negative are removed due to the crisp indicators of consensus clustering. Based on the CGUFS framework, two formulations are put forward by using the utility function and co-association matrix, respectively, and we propose the (weighted) K-means-like optimization solution for efficient solutions with theoretical supports. Moreover, we extend the CGUFS framework to handle multi-view data feature selection. Extensive experiments on several singleview and multi-view data mining data sets in different domains demonstrate that our methods outperform the most recent state-ofthe-art work in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. Some important impact factors and model parameters within CGUFS are thoroughly discussed for practical use.

Balanced clustering aims at partitioning a dataset with roughly even cluster sizes while exploiting the intrinsic structure of the data. Despite attracting increased attention recently in both the academia and the industry, most existing balanced clustering algorithms still have high run time complexities that prevent them from being applied to large datasets. To cope with this challenge, we propose a Fast Clustering with Flexible balance Constraints FCFC, a simple, fast and effective clustering algorithm that can deal with flexible balance constraints. In essence, FCFC employs K-means as the core clustering algorithm and the cluster size variances as the penalty for imbalance. The objective function consists of the combined classical K-means clustering cost as well as the imbalance penalty. By exploiting a new insight of the second term, FCFC is able to employ an efficient K-means-like optimization procedure that can scale to big datasets. Furthermore, we also extend our model for multiple balance constraints with theoretical supports. Extensive experimental results show that our method exceeds several state-of-the-art methods by large margins in terms of efficiency and clustering quality. Finally, a real-world application for Bing search is provided, where data are organized in multiple machines with data size and query frequency balancing objectives. In the simulated scenario, our solution achieves the same fidelity score while reduces cost by 75% compared to the baseline method.

Multi-view clustering, as one of the most important methods to analyze multi-view data, has been widely used in many real-world applications. Most existing multi-view clustering methods perform well on the assumption that each sample appears in all views. Nevertheless, in real-world application, each view may well face the problem of the missing data due to noise, or malfunction. In this paper, a new consistent generative adversarial network is proposed for partial multi-view clustering. We learn a common low-dimensional representation, which can both generate the missing view data and capture a better common structure from partial multi-view data for clustering. Different from the most existing methods, we use the common representation encoded by one view to generate the missing data of the corresponding view by generative adversarial networks, then we use the encoder and clustering networks. This is intuitive and meaningful because encoding common representation and generating the missing data in our model will promote mutually. Experimental results on three different multi-view databases illustrate the superiority of the proposed method.

Detecting outliers or anomalies is a fundamental problem in various machine learning and data mining applications. Conventional outlier detection algorithms are mainly designed for single-view data. Nowadays, data can be easily collected from multiple views, and many learning tasks such as clustering and classification have benefited from multi-view data. However, outlier detection from multi-view data is still a very challenging problem, as the data in multiple views usually have more complicated distributions and exhibit inconsistent behaviors. To address this problem, we propose a multi-view low-rank analysis (MLRA) framework for outlier detection in this article. MLRA pursuits outliers from a new perspective, robust data representation. It contains two major components. First, the cross-view low-rank coding is performed to reveal the intrinsic structures of data. In particular, we formulate a regularized rank-minimization problem, which is solved by an efficient optimization algorithm. Second, the outliers are identified through an outlier score estimation procedure. Different from the existing multi-view outlier detection methods, MLRA is able to detect two different types of outliers from multiple views simultaneously. To this end, we design a criterion to estimate the outlier scores by analyzing the obtained representation coefficients. Moreover, we extend MLRA to tackle the multi-view group outlier detection problem. Extensive evaluations on seven UCI datasets, the MovieLens, the USPS-MNIST, and the WebKB datasets demon strate that our approach outperforms several state-of-the-art outlier detection methods.

In recent decades, tremendous emerging techniques thrive the artificial intelligence field due to the increasing collected data captured from multiple sensors. These multi-view data provide more rich information than traditional single-view data. Fusing heterogeneous information for certain tasks is a core part of multi-view learning, especially for multi-view clustering. Although numerous multi-view clustering algorithms have been proposed, most scholars focus on finding the common space of different views, but unfortunately ignore the benefits from partition level by ensemble clustering. For ensemble clustering, however, there is no interaction between individual partitions from each view and the final consensus one. To fill the gap, we propose a Consensus Guided Multi-View Clustering (CMVC) framework, which incorporates the generation of basic partitions from each view and fusion of consensus clustering in an interactive way, i.e., the consensus clustering guides the generation of basic partitions, and high quality basic partitions positively contribute to the consensus clustering as well. We design a non-trivial optimization solution to formulate CMVC into two iterative k -means clusterings by an approximate calculation. In addition, the generalization of CMVC provides a rich feasibility for different scenarios, and the extension of CMVC with incomplete multi-view clustering further validates the effectiveness for real-world applications. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advantages of CMVC over other widely used multi-view clustering methods in terms of cluster validity, and the robustness of CMVC to some important parameters and incomplete multi-view data.

The lack of labels and the poor quality of data present a common challenge in many data mining and machine learning problems. The model performance might be limited if only a few labeled samples are available for training. Moreover, the data may be noisy in reality, which disturbs the data distribution and further hinders the learning performance. These problems become even more critical in multi-label classification, which has an intricate label space and usually requires clean data for training. In this paper, we aim to tackle the above problems by learning effective feature representations for semi-supervised multi-label classification. We propose a novel approach named Adaptive Low-rank Semi-supervised learning for Multi-label classification (ALSM). It learns an intermediate feature space for both labeled and unlabeled training samples via low-rank matrix recovery, and employs an adaptive semi-supervised learning strategy to train a multi-label classifier. We solve the problem by devising an optimization algorithm based on the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). Our approach can be applied to both transductive and inductive semi-supervised multi-label classification problems. Experiments on five benchmark multi-label datasets show that our approach outperforms the representative multi-label classification methods in most cases.

Graphs play an essential role in many data mining paradigms, such as semi-supervised classification. Conventional graph learning methods mainly focus on constructing graphs from single-view data. Nowadays data can be collected from multiple views using various sensors. How to construct a robust and reliable graph from multi-view data is still an open problem. In this paper, we propose a multi-view graph learning (MVGL) approach with adaptive label propagation for semi-supervised classification. MVGL integrates latent factor extraction, graph sparsification, and label propagation into a unified framework. It seeks shared latent factors from multi-view data as view-independent data representations, and then constructs a sparse graph accordingly. Meanwhile, the label propagation is adaptively optimized during graph construction. An efficient optimization algorithm is designed to solve the model. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show remarkable improvements over both single-view and multi-view learning baselines.

Family photo recognition is an important task in social media analytics. Previous methods use singleton global features and conventional binary classifiers to distinguish family group photos from non-family ones. Different from them, we propose a novel family recognition approach with three dedicated local representations under Multiple Instance Learning framework, where geometry, kinship and semantic features are integrated to overcome issues in the previous work. Experimental results show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art result among global-feature models.

As a promising way for heterogeneous data analytics, consensus clustering has attracted increasing attention in recent decades. Among various excellent solutions, the co-association matrix based methods form a landmark, which redefines consensus clustering as a graph partition problem. Nevertheless, the relatively high time and space complexities preclude it from wide real-life applications. We, therefore, propose Spectral Ensemble Clustering (SEC) to leverage the advantages of co-association matrix in information integration but run more efficiently. We disclose the theoretical equivalence between SEC and weighted K-means clustering, which dramatically reduces the algorithmic complexity. We also derive the latent consensus function of SEC, which to our best knowledge is the first to bridge co-association matrix based methods to the methods with explicit global objective functions. Further, we prove in theory that SEC holds the robustness, generalizability, and convergence properties. We finally extend SEC to meet the challenge arising from incomplete basic partitions, based on which a row-segmentation scheme for big data clustering is proposed. Experiments on various real-world data sets in both ensemble and multi-view clustering scenarios demonstrate the superiority of SEC to some state-of-the-art methods. In particular, SEC seems to be a promising candidate for big data clustering.

Outlier detection is a key technique in data ming and machine learning fields. The deviating characters of outliers make huge detrimental effects on the learning tasks. A lot of algorithms are therefore proposed to handle outliers from different perspectives, such as distance, density, angle and so on. Among these approaches, the density-based methods achieve better performance, but also suffer from huge time complexity. Recently, in order to accelerate the speed and improve the performance, the subsampling ensemble method attracts much attention, which has a reasonable theoretical interpretation and high performance. However, existing work only gives the partial picture of outlier detection via row-sampling, the effective portfolio of bi-sampling is still void. In light of this, we propose the general outlier detection framework via bi-sampling, Bi-Sampling Outlier Detection (BSOD) and provide the effective portfolios of the row and column-sampling ratios in a theoretical way. In addition, the benefits of BSOD are fully illustrated in terms of ensemble diversity and divide-and-conquer. Further we employ LOF within BSOD as BI-LOF to conduct extensive experiments. In general, on 30 synthetic and 17 real-world data sets we thoroughly explore the characteristics of BI-LOF with different numbers of instances, features, nearest neighbors, validate the theoretical analysis of BSOD condition on synthetic data sets, and show obvious advantages over other state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of low and high dimensional real-world data sets. And finally we use BI-LOF to conduct image outlier detection and show high quality and stableness of BI-LOF.

By virtue of the increasingly large amount of various sensors, information about the same object can be collected from multiple views. These mutually enriched information can help many real-world applications, such as daily activity recognition in which both video cameras and on-body sensors are continuously collecting information. Such multivariate time series (m.t.s.) data from multiple views can lead to a significant improvement of classification tasks. However, the existing methods for time series data classification only focus on single-view data, and the benefits of mutual-support multiple views are not taken into account. In light of this challenge, we propose a novel approach, named Multi-view Discriminative Bilinear Projections (MDBP), for extracting discriminative features from multi-view m.t.s. data. First, MDBP keeps the original temporal structure of m.t.s. data, and projects m.t.s. from different views onto a shared latent subspace. Second, MDBP incorporates discriminative information by minimizing the within-class separability and maximizing the between-class separability of m.t.s. in the shared latent subspace. Moreover, a Laplacian regularization term is designed to preserve the temporal smoothness within m.t.s.. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Compared to the state-of-the-art multi-view learning and m.t.s. classification methods, our approach greatly improves the classification accuracy due to the full exploration of multi-view streaming data. Moreover, by using a feature fusion strategy, our approach further improves the classification accuracy by at least 10%.

Ensemble Clustering (EC) aims to integrate multiple Basic Partitions (BPs) of the same dataset into a consensus one. It could be transformed as a graph partition problem on the co-association matrix derived from BPs. However, existing EC methods usually directly use the co-association matrix, yet without considering various noises (e.g., the disagreement between different BPs or outliers) that may exist in it. These noises can impair the cluster structure of a co-association matrix and thus degrade the final clustering performance. In this paper, we propose a novel Robust Spectral Ensemble Clustering (RSEC) approach to address this challenge. First, RSEC learns a robust representation for the co-association matrix through low-rank constraint, which reveals the cluster structure of a co-association matrix and captures various noises in it. Second, RSEC finds the consensus partition by conducting spectral clustering. These two steps are iteratively performed in a unified optimization framework. Most importantly, during our optimization process, we utilize consensus partition to iteratively enhance the block-diagonal structure of the learned representation to further assist the clustering process. Experiments on numerous real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method compared with the state-of-the-art. Moreover, several impact factors that may affect the clustering performance of our approach are also explored extensively.

High-throughput technologies have enabled us to rapidly accumulate a wealth of diverse data types. These multi-view data contain much more information to uncover the cluster structure than single-view data, which draws raising attention in data mining and machine learning areas. On one hand, many features are extracted to provide enough information for better representations, on the other hand, such abundant features might result in noisy, redundant and irrelevant information, which harms the performance of the learning algorithms. In this paper, we focus on a new topic, multi-view unsupervised feature selection, which aims to discover the discriminative features in each view for better explanation and representation. Although there are some exploratory studies along this direction, most of them employ the traditional feature selection by putting the features in different views together and fail to evaluate the performance in the multi-view setting. The features selected in this way are difficult to explain due to the meaning of different views, which disobeys the goal of feature selection as well. In light of this, we intend to give a correct understanding of multi-view feature selection. Different from the existing work, which either incorrectly concatenates the features from different views, or takes huge time complexity to learn the pseudo labels, we propose a novel algorithm, Robust Multi-view Feature Selection (RMFS), which applies robust multi-view K-means to obtain the robust and high quality pseudo labels for sparse feature selection in an efficient way. Nontrivially we give the solution by taking the derivatives and further provide a K-means-like optimization to update several variables in a unified framework with the convergence guarantee. We demonstrate extensive experiments on three real-world multi-view data sets, which illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of RMFS in terms of both single-view and multi-view evaluations by a large margin.

Domain adaptation has achieved promising results in many areas, such as image classification and object recognition. Although a lot of algorithms have been proposed to solve the task with different domain distributions, it remains a challenge for multi-source unsupervised domain adaptation. In addition, most of the existing algorithms learn a classifier on the source domain and predict the labels for the target data, which indicates that only the knowledge derived from the hyperplane is transferred to the target domain and the structure information is ignored. In light of this, we propose a novel algorithm for multi-source unsupervised domain adaptation. Generally speaking, we aim to preserve the whole structure from source domains and transfer it to serve the task on the target domain. The source and target data are put together for clustering, which simultaneously explores the structures of the source and target domains. The structure-preserved information from source domain further guides the clustering process on the target domain. Extensive experiments on two widely used databases on object recognition and face identification show the substantial improvement of our proposed approach over several state-of-the-art methods. Especially, our algorithm can take use of multi-source domains and achieve robust and better performance compared with the single source domain adaptation methods.

Image clustering has been a critical preprocessing step for vision tasks, e.g., visual concept discovery, content-based image retrieval. Conventional image clustering methods use handcraft visual descriptors as basic features via K-means, or build the graph within spectral clustering. Recently, representation learning with deep structure shows appealing performance in unsupervised feature pre-treatment. However, few studies have discussed how to deploy deep representation learning to image clustering problems, especially the unified framework which integrates both representation learning and ensemble clustering for efficient image clustering still remains void. In addition, even though it is widely recognized that with the increasing number of basic partitions, ensemble clustering gets better performance and lower variances, the best number of basic partitions for a given data set is a pending problem. In light of this, we propose the Infinite Ensemble Clustering (IEC), which incorporates the power of deep representation and ensemble clustering in a one-step framework to fuse infinite basic partitions. Generally speaking, a set of basic partitions is firstly generated from the image data, then by converting the basic partitions to the 1-of-K codings, we link the marginalized auto-encoder to the infinite ensemble clustering with i.i.d. basic partitions, which can be approached by the closed-form solutions, finally we follow the layer-wise training procedure and feed the concatenated deep features to K-means for final clustering. Extensive experiments on diverse vision data sets with different levels of visual descriptors demonstrate both the time efficiency and superior performance of IEC compared to the state-of-the-art ensemble clustering and deep clustering methods.

Collaborative filtering (CF) has been widely employed within recommender systems to solve many real-world problems. Learning effective latent factors plays the most important role in collaborative filtering. Traditional CF methods based upon matrix factorization techniques learn the latent factors from the user-item ratings and suffer from the cold start problem as well as the sparsity problem. Some improved CF methods enrich the priors on the latent factors by incorporating side information as regularization. However, the learned latent factors may not be very effective due to the sparse nature of the ratings and the side information. To tackle this problem, we learn effective latent representations via deep learning. Deep learning models have emerged as very appealing in learning effective representations in many applications. In particular, we propose a general deep architecture for CF by integrating matrix factorization with deep feature learning. We provide a natural instantiations of our architecture by combining probabilistic matrix factorization with marginalized denoising stacked auto-encoders. The combined framework leads to a parsimonious fit over the latent features as indicated by its improved performance in comparison to prior state-of-art models over four large datasets for the tasks of movie/book recommendation and response prediction.

Constrained clustering uses pre-given knowledge to improve the clustering performance. Among existing literature, researchers usually focus on Must-Link and Cannot-Link pairwise constraints. However, pairwise constraints not only disobey the way we make decisions, but also suffer from the vulnerability of noisy constraints and the order of constraints. In light of this, we use partition level side information instead of pairwise constraints to guide the process of clustering. Compared with pairwise constraints, partition level side information keeps the consistency within partial structure and avoids self-contradictory and the impact of constraints order. Generally speaking, only small part of the data instances are given labels by human workers, which are used to supervise the procedure of clustering. Inspired by the success of ensemble clustering, we aim to find a clustering solution which captures the intrinsic structure from the data itself, and agrees with the partition level side information as much as possible. Then we derive the objective function and equivalently transfer it into a K-mean-like optimization problem. Extensive experiments on several real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method compared to pairwise constrained clustering and consensus clustering, which verifies the superiority of partition level side information to pairwise constraints. Besides, our method has high robustness to noisy side information.

Graph-based semi-supervised learning method has been influential in the data mining and machine learning fields. The key is to construct an effective graph to capture the intrinsic data structure, which further benefits for propagating the unlabeled data over the graph. The existing methods have shown the effectiveness of a graph regularization term on measuring the similarities among samples, which further uncovers the data structure. However, all the existing graph-based methods are on the sample-level, i.e. calculate the similarity based on sample-level representation coefficients, inevitably overlooking the underlying part-level structure within sample. Inspired by the strong interpretability of Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) method, we design a more robust and discriminative graph, by integrating low-rank factorization and graph regularizer into a unified framework. Specifically, a novel low-rank factorization through Semi-Non-negative Matrix Factorization (SNMF) is proposed to extract the semantically part-level representation. Moreover, instead of incorporating a graph regularization on sample-level, we propose a sparse graph regularization term built on the decomposed part-level representation. This practice results in a more accurate measurement among samples, generating a more discriminative graph for semi-supervised learning. As a non-trivial contribution, we also provide an optimization solution to the proposed method. Comprehensive experimental evaluations show that our proposed method is able to achieve superior performance compared with the state-of-the-art semi-supervised classification baselines in both transductive and inductive scenarios.

Ensemble clustering, also known as consensus clustering, is emerging as a promising solution for multi-source and/or heterogeneous data clustering. The co-association matrix based method, which redefines the ensemble clustering problem as a classical graph partition problem, is a landmark method in this area. Nevertheless, the relatively high time and space complexity preclude it from real-life large-scale data clustering. We therefore propose SEC, an efficient Spectral Ensemble Clustering method based on co-association matrix. We show that SEC has theoretical equivalence to weighted K-means clustering and results in vastly reduced algorithmic complexity. We then derive the latent consensus function of SEC, which to our best knowledge is among the first to bridge co-association matrix based method to the methods with explicit object functions. The robustness and generalizability of SEC are then investigated to prove the superiority of SEC in theory. We finally extend SEC to meet the challenge rising from incomplete basic partitions, based on which a scheme for big data clustering can be formed. Experimental results on various real-world data sets demonstrate that SEC is an effective and efficient competitor to some state-of-the-art ensemble clustering methods and is also suitable for big data clustering.

Outlier detection is a fundamental problem in data mining. Unlike most existing methods that are designed for single-view data, we propose a multi-view outlier detection approach in this paper. Multi-view data can provide plentiful information of samples, however, detecting outliers from multi-view data is still a challenging problem due to the complicated distribution and inconsistent behavior of samples across different views. We address this problem through robust data representation, by building a Multi-view Low-Rank Analysis (MLRA) framework. Our framework contains two major components. First, it performs cross-view low-rank analysis for revealing the intrinsic structures of data. Second, it identifies outliers by estimating the outlier score for each test sample. Specifically, we formulate the cross-view low-rank analysis as a constrained rank-minimization problem, and present an efficient optimization algorithm to solve it. Different from the existing multi-view outlier detection methods, our framework is able to detect two different types of outliers from multiple views simultaneously. To this end, we design a criterion to estimate the outlier scores by analyzing the obtained representation coefficients. Experimental results on seven UCI datasets and the USPS-MNIST dataset demonstrate that our approach outperforms several state-of-the-art single-view and multi-view outlier detection methods in most cases.

Upon extensive studies, text clustering remains a critical challenge in data mining community. Even by various techniques proposed to overcome some of these challenges, there still exist problems when dealing with weakly related or even noisy features. In response to this, we propose a DIssemble-ASsemble (DIAS) framework for text clustering. DIAS employs simple random feature sampling to disassemble high-dimensional text data and gains diverse structural knowledge. This also does good to avoiding the bulk of noisy features. Then the multi-view knowledge is assembled by weighted Information-theoretic Consensus Clustering (ICC) in order to gain a high-quality consensus partitioning. Extensive experiments on eight real-world text data sets demonstrate the advantages of DIAS over other widely used methods. In particular, DIAS shows strengths in learning from very weak basic partitionings. In addition, it is the natural suitability to distributed computing that makes DIAS become a promising candidate for big text clustering.

Conversion prediction and click prediction are two important and intertwined problems in display advertising, but existing approaches usually look at them in isolation. In this paper, we aim to predict the conversion response of users by jointly examining the past purchase behavior and the click response behavior. Additionally, we model the temporal dynamics between the click response and purchase activity into a unified framework. In particular, a novel matrix factorization approach named dynamic collective matrix factorization (DCMF) is proposed to address this problem. Our model considers temporal dynamics of post-click conversions and also takes advantages of the side information of users, advertisements, and items. Experiments on a real-world marketing dataset show that our model achieves significant improvements over several baselines.

Graphs have been widely applied in modeling the relationships and structures in real-world applications. Graph construction is the most critical part in these models, while how to construct an effective graph is still an open problem. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to graph construction based on two observations. First, by virtue of recent advances in low-rank subspace recovery, the similarity between every two samples evaluated in the low-rank code space is more robust than that in the sample space. Second, a sparse and balanced graph can greatly increase the performance of learning tasks, such as label propagation in graph based semi-supervised learning. The$k$-NN sparsification can provide fast solutions to constructing unbalanced sparse graphs, and$b$-matching constraint is a necessary route for generating balanced graphs. These observations motivate us to jointly learn the low-rank codes and balanced (or unbalanced) graph simultaneously. In particular, two non-convex models are built by incorporating$k$-NN constraint and$b$-matching constraint into the low-rank representation model, respectively. We design a majorization-minimization augmented Lagrange multiplier (MM-ALM) algorithm to solve the proposed models. Extensive experimental results on four image databases demonstrate the superiority of our graphs over several state-of-the-art graphs in data clustering, transductive and inductive semi-supervised learning.

Multi-view data is very popular in real-world applications, as different view-points and various types of sensors help to better represent data when fused across views or modalities. Samples from different views of the same class are less similar than those with the same view but different class. We consider a more general case that prior view information of testing data is inaccessible in multi-view learning. Traditional multi-view learning algorithms were designed to obtain multiple view-specific linear projections and would fail without this prior information available. That was because they assumed the probe and gallery views were known in advance, so the correct view-specific projections were to be applied in order to better learn low-dimensional features. To address this, we propose a Low-Rank Common Subspace (LRCS) for multi-view data analysis, which seeks a common low-rank linear projection to mitigate the semantic gap among different views. The low-rank common projection is able to capture compatible intrinsic information across different views and also well-align the within-class samples from different views. Furthermore, with a low-rank constraint on the view-specific projected data and that transformed by the common subspace, the within-class samples from multiple views would concentrate together. Different from the traditional supervised multi-view algorithms, our LRCS works in a weakly supervised way, where only the view information gets observed. Such a common projection can make our model more flexible when dealing with the problem of lacking prior view information of testing data. Two scenarios of experiments, robust subspace learning and transfer learning, are conducted to evaluate our algorithm. Experimental results on several multi-view datasets reveal that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art, even when compared with some supervised learning methods.

This work focuses on early classification of ongoing observation of the object, which is beneficial for a number of applications that require time-critical decision making. We propose an approach for discovering two key aspects of multivariate time series (m.t.s.) observation, (1) Temporal Dynamics and (2) Sequential Cues. The key idea is that m.t.s. Observation can be represented as an instantiation of a Multivariate Marked Point-Process (Multi-MPP). Each variable characterizes the temporal dynamics of a particular feature event of an object, where both timing and strength information of that feature event are preserved. To make this model computationally practical, we introduce the Multilevel-Discretized Marked Point-Process (MD-MPP) model which can ensure a good piece-wise stationary property both in the time-domain and mark-space while preserving dynamics as much as possible. Based on this model, another important temporal patterns of early classification, sequential cues among variables, becomes formalizable. We construct a probabilistic suffix tree to represent sequential patterns among features in terms of Variable order Markov Model (VMM). The effectiveness of our approach is evaluated on three experimental scenarios. Our method achieves superior performance for early classification of ongoing m.t.s. Observation data.

Subspace learning is a popular approach for feature extraction and classification. However, its performance would be heavily degraded when data are corrupted by large amounts of noise. Inspired by recent work in matrix recovery, we tackle this problem by exploiting a subspace that is robust to noise and large variability for classification. Specifically, we propose a novel Supervised Regularization based Robust Subspace (SRRS) approach via low-rank learning. Unlike existing subspace methods, our approach jointly learns low-rank representations and a robust subspace from noisy observations. At the same time, to improve the classification performance, class label information is incorporated as supervised regularization. The problem can then be formulated as a constrained rank minimization objective function, which can be effectively solved by the inexact augmented Lagrange multiplier (ALM) algorithm. Our approach differs from current sparse representation and low-rank learning methods in that it explicitly learns a low-dimensional subspace where the supervised information is incorporated. Extensive experimental results on four datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art subspace and low-rank learning methods in almost all cases, especially when the data contain large variations or are heavily corrupted by noise.

One of the most important challenges in machine learning is performing effective learning when there are limited training data available. However, there is an important case when there are sufficient training data coming from other domains (source). Transfer learning aims at finding ways to transfer knowledge learned from a source domain to a target domain by handling the subtle differences between the source and target. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to solve the aforementioned knowledge transfer problem via low-rank representation constraints. This is achieved by finding an optimal subspace where each datum in the target domain can be linearly represented by the corresponding subspace in the source domain. Extensive experiments on several databases, i.e., Yale B, CMU PIE, UB Kin Face databases validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach and show the superiority to the existing, well-established methods.

This paper explores correspondence and mixture topic modeling of documents tagged from two different perspectives. There has been ongoing work in topic modeling of documents with tags (tag-topic models) where words and tags typically reflect a single perspective, namely document content. However, words in documents can also be tagged from different perspectives, for example, syntactic perspective as in part-of-speech tagging or an opinion perspective as in sentiment tagging. The models proposed in this paper are novel in: (i) the consideration of two different tag perspectives -- a document level tag perspective that is relevant to the document as a whole and a word level tag perspective pertaining to each word in the document; (ii) the attribution of latent topics with word level tags and labeling latent topics with images in case of multimedia documents; and (iii) discovering the possible correspondence of the words to document level tags. The proposed correspondence tag-topic model shows better predictive power i.e. higher likelihood on heldout test data than all existing tag topic models and even a supervised topic model. To evaluate the models in practical scenarios, quantitative measures between the outputs of the proposed models and the ground truth domain knowledge have been explored. Manually assigned (gold standard) document category labels in Wikipedia pages are used to validate model-generated tag suggestions using a measure of pairwise concept similarity within an ontological hierarchy like WordNet. Using a news corpus, automatic relationship discovery between person names was performed and compared to a robust baseline.