Seismic inversion is an effective way to investigate the lithology and fluid in hydrocarbon-bearing reservoirs. In addition to obtaining inversion results, probabilistic seismic prediction can be used for uncertainty evaluation. Its prior probability is usually assumed to follow a specific distribution, which limits the prediction accuracy. By considering both the p-norm and total variation (TV) constraints, an improved prior is proposed. The p-norm constraint is first introduced into the probabilistic seismic prediction, which can be reduced to other probability distribution forms. With the p-norm constraint, the probability density function is updated. Then, the posterior probability with both the p-norm and TV constraints is re-derived. By analysis, the proposed approach helps to preserve the boundary and highlight the sparsity. Compared with a specific prior distribution, the proposed prior is more flexible and can effectively improve the prediction accuracy. The proposed approach is discussed in detail in terms of probabilistic prediction by using synthetic data. Both synthetic data and field data tests demonstrate the superiority of the proposed prior. The construction of the prior with p-norm and TV constraints is of great help to improve probabilistic prediction.

Video recommendation has become an essential way of helping people explore the massive videos and discover the ones that may be of interest to them. In the existing video recommender systems, the models make the recommendations based on the user-video interactions and single specific content features. When the specific content features are unavailable, the performance of the existing models will seriously deteriorate. Inspired by the fact that rich contents (e.g., text, audio, motion, and so on) exist in videos, in this paper, we explore how to use these rich contents to overcome the limitations caused by the unavailability of the specific ones. Specifically, we propose a novel general framework that incorporates arbitrary single content feature with user-video interactions, named as collaborative embedding regression (CER) model, to make effective video recommendation in both in-matrix and out-of-matrix scenarios. Our extensive experiments on two real-world large-scale datasets show that CER beats the existing recommender models with any single content feature and is more time efficient. In addition, we propose a priority-based late fusion (PRI) method to gain the benefit brought by the integrating the multiple content features. The corresponding experiment shows that PRI brings real performance improvement to the baseline and outperforms the existing fusion methods.

Accurate user representation learning has been proven fundamental for many social media applications, including community detection, recommendation, etc. A major challenge lies in that, the available data in a single social network are usually very limited and sparse. In real life, many people are members of several social networks in the same time. Constrained by the features and design of each, any single social platform offers only a partial view of a user from a particular perspective. In this paper, we propose MV-URL, a multi-view user representation learning model to enhance user modeling by integrating the knowledge from various networks. Different from the traditional network embedding frameworks where either the whole framework is single-network based or each network involved is a homogeneous network, we focus on multiple social networks and each network in our task is a heterogeneous network. It's very challenging to effectively fuse knowledge in this setting as the fusion depends upon not only the varying relatedness of information sources, but also the target application tasks. MV-URL focuses on two tasks: user account linkage (i.e., to predict the missing true user account linkage across social media) and user attribute prediction. Extensive evaluations have been conducted on two real-world collections of linked social networks, and the experimental results show the superiority of MV-URL compared with existing state-of-art embedding methods. It can be learned online, and is trivially parallelizable. These qualities make it suitable for real world applications.

In learning applications, exploring the cluster structures of the high dimensional data is an important task. It requires projecting or visualizing the cluster structures into a low dimensional space. The challenges are: 1) how to perform the projection or visualization with less information loss and 2) how to preserve the interpretability of the original data. Recent methods address these challenges simultaneously by unsupervised feature selection. They learn the cluster indicators based on the$k$nearest neighbor similarity graph, then select the features highly correlated with these indicators. Under this direction, many techniques, such as local discriminative analysis, nonnegative spectral analysis, nonnegative matrix factorization, etc., have been successfully introduced to make the selection more accurate. In this paper, we focus on enhancing the unsupervised feature selection in another perspective, namely, making the selection exploit the combination effect of the features. Given the expected feature amount, previous works operate on the whole features then select those of high coefficients one by one as the output. Our proposed method, instead, operates on a group of features initially then update the selection when a better group appears. Compared to the previous methods, the proposed method exploits the combination effect of the features by$\ell {}_{2,0}$norm. It improves the selection accuracy where the cluster structures are strongly related to a group of features. We conduct the experiments on six open access data sets from different domains. The experimental results show that our proposed method is more accurate than the recent methods which do not specially consider the combination effect of the features.

Studying recommender systems under streaming scenarios has become increasingly important because real-world applications produce data continuously and rapidly. However, most existing recommender systems today are designed in the context of an offline setting. Compared with the traditional recommender systems, large-volume and high-velocity are posing severe challenges for streaming recommender systems. In this paper, we investigate the problem of streaming recommendations being subject to higher input rates than they can immediately process with their available system resources (i.e., CPU and memory). In particular, we provide a principled framework called as SPMF (Stream-centered Probabilistic Matrix Factorization model), based on BPR (Bayesian Personalized Ranking) optimization framework, for performing efficient ranking based recommendations in stream settings. Experiments on three real-world datasets illustrate the superiority of SPMF in online recommendations.

Cold-start problem and recommendation efficiency have been regarded as two crucial challenges in the recommender system. In this paper, we propose a hashing based deep learning framework called Discrete Deep Learning (DDL), to map users and items to Hamming space, where a user»s preference for an item can be efficiently calculated by Hamming distance, and this computation scheme significantly improves the efficiency of online recommendation. Besides, DDL unifies the user-item interaction information and the item content information to overcome the issues of data sparsity and cold-start. To be more specific, to integrate content information into our DDL framework, a deep learning model, Deep Belief Network (DBN), is applied to extract effective item representation from the item content information. Besides, the framework imposes balance and irrelevant constraints on binary codes to derive compact but informative binary codes. Due to the discrete constraints in DDL, we propose an efficient alternating optimization method consisting of iteratively solving a series of mixed-integer programming subproblems. Extensive experiments have been conducted to evaluate the performance of our DDL framework on two different Amazon datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate the superiority of DDL over the state-of-the-art methods regarding online recommendation efficiency and cold-start recommendation accuracy.

In our daily life, how to match clothing well is always a troublesome problem especially when we are shopping online to select a pair of matched pieces of clothing from tens of thousands available selections. To help common customers overcome selection issues, recent studies in the recommender system area have started to infer the fashion matching results automatically. The traditional fashion recommendation is normally achieved by considering visual similarity of clothing items or/and item co-purchase history from existing shopping transactions. Due to the high complexity of visual features and the lack of historical item purchase records, most of the existing work is unlikely to make an efficient and accurate recommendation. To address the problem, in this paper, we propose a new model called Discrete Supervised Fashion Coordinates Hashing. Its main objective is to learn meaningful yet compact high-level features of clothing items, which are represented as binary hash codes. In detail, this learning process is supervised by a clothing matching matrix, which is initially constructed based on limited known matching pairs and subsequently on the self-augmented ones. The proposed model jointly learns the intrinsic matching patterns from the matching matrix and the binary representations from the clothing items’ images, where the visual feature of each clothing item is discretized into a fixed-length binary vector. The binary representation learning significantly reduces the memory cost and accelerates the recommendation speed. The experiments compared with several state-of-the-art approaches have evidenced the superior performance of the proposed approach on efficient fashion recommendation.

With the rapid development of location-based social networks (LBSNs), spatial item recommendation has become an important way of helping users discover interesting locations to increase their engagement with location-based services. The availability of spatial, temporal, and social information in LBSNs offers an unprecedented opportunity to enhance the spatial item recommendation. Many previous works studied spatial and social influences on spatial item recommendation in LBSNs. Due to the strong correlations between a user’s check-in time and the corresponding check-in location, which include the sequential influence and temporal cyclic effect, it is essential for spatial item recommender system to exploit the temporal effect to improve the recommendation accuracy. Leveraging temporal information in spatial item recommendation is, however, very challenging, considering (1) when integrating sequential influences, users’ check-in data in LBSNs has a low sampling rate in both space and time, which renders existing location prediction techniques on GPS trajectories ineffective, and the prediction space is extremely large, with millions of distinct locations as the next prediction target, which impedes the application of classical Markov chain models; (2) there are various temporal cyclic patterns (i.e., daily, weekly, and monthly) in LBSNs, but existing work is limited to one specific pattern; and (3) there is no existing framework that unifies users’ personal interests, temporal cyclic patterns, and the sequential influence of recently visited locations in a principled manner. In light of the above challenges, we propose a Temporal Personalized Model ( TPM ), which introduces a novel latent variable topic-region to model and fuse sequential influence, cyclic patterns with personal interests in the latent and exponential space. The advantages of modeling the temporal effect at the topic-region level include a significantly reduced prediction space, an effective alleviation of data sparsity, and a direct expression of the semantic meaning of users’ spatial activities. Moreover, we introduce two methods to model the effect of various cyclic patterns. The first method is a time indexing scheme that encodes the effect of various cyclic patterns into a binary code. However, the indexing scheme faces the data sparsity problem in each time slice. To deal with this data sparsity problem, the second method slices the time according to each cyclic pattern separately and explores these patterns in a joint additive model. Furthermore, we design an asymmetric Locality Sensitive Hashing (ALSH) technique to speed up the online top- k recommendation process by extending the traditional LSH. We evaluate the performance of TPM on two real datasets and one large-scale synthetic dataset. The performance of TPM in recommending cold-start items is also evaluated. The results demonstrate a significant improvement in TPM’s ability to recommend spatial items, in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency, compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

With the rapid prevalence of smart mobile devices and the dramatic proliferation of mobile applications (Apps), App recommendation becomes an emergent task that will benefit different stockholders of mobile App ecosystems. Unlike traditional items, Apps have privileges to access a user's sensitive resources (e.g., contacts, messages and locations) which may lead to security risk or privacy leak. Thus, users' choosing of Apps are influenced by not only their personal interests but also their privacy preferences. Moreover, user privacy preferences vary with App categories. In this paper, we propose a mobile sparse additive generative model (Mobi-SAGE) to recommend Apps by considering both user interests and category-aware user privacy preferences. We collected a real-world dataset from 360 App store - the biggest Android App platform in China, and conduct extensive experiments on it. The experimental results show that our Mobi-SAGE consistently and significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches, which implies the importance of exploiting category-aware user privacy preferences.

On time-dependent graphs, fastest path query is an important problem and has been well studied. It focuses on minimizing the total travel time (waiting time + on-road time) but does not allow waiting on any intermediate vertex if the FIFO property is applied. However, in practice, waiting on a vertex can reduce the time spent on the road (for example, resuming traveling after a traffic jam). In this paper, we study how to find a path with the minimal on-road time on time-dependent graphs by allowing waiting on some predefined parking vertices. The existing works are based on the following fact: the arrival time of a vertex v is determined by the arrival time of its in-neighbor u , which does not hold in our scenario since we also consider the waiting time on u if u allows waiting. Thus, determining the waiting time on each parking vertex to achieve the minimal on-road time becomes a big challenge, which further breaks FIFO property. To cope with this challenging problem, we propose two efficient algorithms using minimum on-road travel cost function to answer the query. The evaluations on multiple real-world time-dependent graphs show that the proposed algorithms are more accurate and efficient than the extensions of existing algorithms. In addition, the results further indicate, if the parking facilities are enabled in the route scheduling algorithms, the on-road time will reduce significantly compared to the fastest path algorithms.

Recent improvements in content-based video search have led to systems with promising accuracy, thus opening up the possibility for interactive content-based video search to the general public. We present an interactive system based on a state-of-the-art content-based video search pipeline which enables users to do multimodal text-to-video and video-to-video search in large video collections, and to incrementally refine queries through relevance feedback and model visualization. Also, the comprehensive functionalities enhance a flexible formulation of multimodal queries with different characteristics. Quantitative and qualitative analysis shows that our system is capable of assisting users to incrementally build effective queries over complex event topics.