Large-language-model (LLM) based user simulation is increasingly adopted for evaluating search engines, recommender systems, and retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, yet most simulators remain opaque: it is difficult to determine why a simulated user made a particular choice or whether that choice is consistent with the intended user profile. Compounding this, recent research shows that LLMs can produce biased or discriminatory responses depending on user background characteristics such as language, education level, and cultural context, raising concerns about the equitable treatment of minority and disadvantaged groups. This half-day, in-person tutorial introduces a proposed design-and-audit framework that treats a user simulator as a verifiable engineering artefact composed of seven auditable components---structured Persona, task-aware Contract, matched human-vs-agent Execution, auditable Trace, persona-aligned Verification, structured Feedback, and a Refinement loop that updates personas and contracts. Through two hands-on mini-labs on recommendation-list evaluation and search-query formulation, participants will inspect simulator behaviour end-to-end, distinguish diagnostic discrepancy analysis from statistical validation, and apply checks for fidelity, credibility, and demographic bias. The tutorial targets information retrieval and recommender systems researchers and practitioners interested in user behaviour simulation and responsible AI.

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agent simulation has emerged as a promising approach to meet the increasing demand for real-time and rigorous evaluation in modern recommender systems. A typical LLM-driven simulation framework comprises three essential components: the profile module, memory module, and action module. However, existing studies have primarily concentrated on enhancing the memory and action modules, with limited attention to profile generation, which plays a pivotal role in ensuring realistic agent behaviours and aligning simulated interactions with real user dynamics. Moreover, the scarcity of datasets specifically designed for recommendation simulations has led to heavy reliance on manually crafted profiles, significantly limiting the scalability and generalisability of simulation frameworks across different datasets. To address these challenges, this work proposes an Automated Profile Generation Framework for Recommendation Simulation, APG4RecSim, that constructs realistic, coherent, and robust user profiles with minimal supervision. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that APG4RecSim achieves the best overall performance on discrimination, ranking, and rating tasks, improving ranking quality by up to 7% in nDCG@10 and reducing rating distribution divergence by 8% in JSD compared to existing profile-generation baselines. Beyond overall performance gains, our results show that APG4RecSim produces profiles that are resilient to popularity- and position-induced biases and maintain stable performance across datasets and different LLMs.

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used for question answering (QA) but can generate biased or stereotype-driven answers due to demographic associations learned during pre-training. Existing mitigation strategies often rely on model access or fine-tuning, which limits their applicability to closed-source LLMs. We propose a Causal Front Door Prompting framework (CFDP) that reduces demographic influence by intervening on the chain of thought reasoning, which is treated as an observable mediator. CFDP samples and clusters multiple reasoning traces and estimates answer probabilities through weighted aggregation. Experiments on two widely used bias-sensitive QA benchmarks, BBQ and Stereotype, across major LLMs show that CFDP consistently improves fairness metrics without sacrificing QA accuracy. Ablation and sensitivity analyses confirm the value of each component, indicating that causal intervention on reasoning provides an effective and practical approach for bias mitigation in LLM-based QA.

Recommenders built upon implicit collaborative filtering are typically trained to distinguish between users' positive and negative preferences. When direct observations of the latter are unavailable, negative training data are constructed with sampling techniques. But since items often exhibit clustering in the latent space, existing methods tend to oversample negatives from dense regions, resulting in homogeneous training data and limited model expressiveness. To address these shortcomings, we propose a novel negative sampler with diversity guarantees. To achieve them, our approach first pairs each positive item of a user with one that they have not yet interacted with; this instance, called hard negative, is chosen as the top-scoring item according to the model. Instead of discarding the remaining highly informative items, we store them in a user-specific cache. Next, our diversity-augmented sampler selects a representative subset of negatives from the cache, ensuring its dissimilarity from the corresponding user's hard negatives. Our generator then combines these items with the hard negatives, replacing them to produce more effective (synthetic) negative training data that are informative and diverse. Experiments show that our method consistently leads to superior recommendation quality without sacrificing computational efficiency.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate human-like capabilities in language understanding, reasoning, and generation, driving interest in using LLM-based agents to simulate human feedback in recommender systems. However, most existing approaches rely on static user profiling, neglecting the temporal and dynamic nature of user interests. This limitation stems from a disconnect between language modelling and behaviour modelling, which constrains the capacity of agents to represent sequential patterns. To address this challenge, we propose a Dynamic Temporal-aware Agent-based simulator for Recommender Systems, DyTA4Rec, which enables agents to model and utilise evolving user behaviour based on historical interactions. DyTA4Rec features a dynamic updater for real-time profile refinement, temporal-enhanced prompting for sequential context, and self-adaptive aggregation for coherent feedback. Experimental results at group and individual levels show that DyTA4Rec significantly improves the alignment between simulated and actual user behaviour by modelling dynamic characteristics and enhancing temporal awareness in LLM-based agents.

Recommender systems trained on implicit feedback data rely on negative sampling to distinguish positive items from negative items for each user. Since the majority of positive interactions come from a small group of active users, negative samplers are often impacted by data imbalance, leading them to choose more informative negatives for prominent users while providing less useful ones for users who are not so active. This leads to inactive users being further marginalised in the training process, thus receiving inferior recommendations. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study demonstrating that state-of-the-art negative sampling strategies provide more accurate recommendations for active users than for inactive users. We also find that increasing the number of negative samples for each positive item improves the average performance, but the benefit is distributed unequally across user groups, with active users experiencing performance gain while inactive users suffering performance degradation. To address this, we propose a group-specific negative sampling strategy that assigns smaller negative ratios to inactive user groups and larger ratios to active groups. Experiments on eight negative samplers show that our approach improves user-side fairness and performance when compared to a uniform global ratio.

In recent years, utility optimization and fairness have emerged as key objectives in spatial-temporal resource allocation systems, such as ridesharing and food delivery, attracting significant research interest due to their often conflicting nature. Systems focused solely on optimizing utility can create disparities, such as disparate earnings among rideshare drivers, leading to ethical and economic issues. Conversely, focusing solely on fairness can paradoxically reduce overall utility, resulting in a scenario where no one truly benefits. To address this, many Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based approaches have been proposed due to its capacity to generate dynamic, non-myopic allocation plans. Typically, RL-based approaches balance utility and fairness by constructing direct trade-off functions between them. However, this paper argues that in dynamic situations, the scale of the objectives may differ significantly, causing RL to overemphasize one objective at the expense of the other. To effectively address this issue, we propose formulating the challenge of balancing utility and fairness in spatial-temporal resource allocation as a Constrained Markov Decision Process. Here, fairness is treated as a constraint while utility optimization serves as the standard reward. Building on this foundation, we introduce Dynamic Budgeted Proximal Policy Optimization (DB-PPO). We demonstrate that DB-PPO outperforms existing approaches in fairness-oriented spatial-temporal resource allocations using two real-world publicly available datasets.

Deep spatio-temporal neural networks are increasingly used in urban computing, impacting critical infrastructure such as public transport, emergency services, and traffic systems. While most methods focus on accuracy, fairness has become a key concern as biased predictions can disadvantage specific demographic or geographic groups, reinforcing inequalities. We propose FairDRL-ST, a disentangled representation learning framework for fair spatio-temporal prediction, with a focus on mobility demand forecasting. By combining adversarial and disentangled learning, our approach separates sensitive attributes and achieves fairness in an unsupervised manner with minimal performance loss. Experiments on real-world urban mobility datasets show that FairDRL-ST reduces fairness gaps while maintaining competitive predictive accuracy against state-of-the-art fairness-aware methods.1

Traditional offline evaluation methods for recommender systems struggle to capture the complexity of modern platforms due to sparse behavioural signals, noisy data, and limited modelling of user personality traits.While simulation frameworks can generate synthetic data to address these gaps, existing methods fail to replicate behavioural diversity, limiting their effectiveness.To overcome these challenges, we propose the Personality-driven User Behaviour Simulator (PUB), an LLM-based simulation framework that integrates the Big Five personality traits to model personalised user behaviour.PUB dynamically infers user personality from behavioural logs (e.g., ratings, reviews) and item metadata, then generates synthetic interactions that preserve statistical fidelity to real-world data.Experiments on the Amazon review datasets show that logs generated by PUB closely align with real user behaviour and reveal meaningful associations between personality traits and recommendation outcomes.These results highlight the potential of the personality-driven simulator to advance recommender system evaluation, offering scalable, controllable, high-fidelity alternatives to resource-intensive real-world experiments.1

Abstract With the introduction of machine learning in high stakes decision-making, ensuring algorithmic fairness has become an increasingly important task. To this end, many mathematical definitions of fairness have been proposed, and a variety of optimisation techniques have been developed, all designed to maximise a given notion of fairness. Fair solutions, however, tend to rely on the quality of training data, and can be highly sensitive to noise. Recent studies have shown that robustness of many such fairness strategies—i.e., their ability to perform well on unseen data—is not a given and requires careful consideration. To address this challenge, we propose robustness ratio , which is a novel criterion to measure the robustness of diverse fairness optimisation strategies. We support our analysis with multiple extensive experiments on five benchmark fairness data sets, using three prominent fairness strategies, in view of four of the most popular definitions of fairness. Our experiments show that while fairness methods that rely on threshold optimisation (post-processing) mostly outperform other techniques, they are acutely sensitive to noise. This is in contrast to two other methods—correlation remover (pre-processing) and exponentiated gradient descent (in-processing)—which become increasingly fairer as the random noise injected into the data becomes larger. Our findings offer a comprehensive overview of fairness strategies that proves invaluable when tasked with choosing the most suitable method for the task at hand. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to quantitatively evaluate the robustness of fairness optimisation strategies.

Itinerary recommendation involves suggesting a sequence of Points of Interests (POIs) that users obtain maximum satisfaction under a time budget. Existing models have three challenges. First, they model user interest as non-time dependent, which cannot capture user interest appropriately because user interest can be contextual on time, e.g., interest in restaurants are likely higher during typical meal times. Second, they model the distance dependency of user interest as a linear one, which does not always adequately capture this relationship, e.g., it could be a cubic decay relationship. Finally, existing studies treat POI recommendation and itinerary optimisation as two separate problems, which can result in sub-optimal itinerary recommendations. In this paper, we propose a deep learning model that recommends POIs and constructs the itinerary simultaneously and in an integrated manner. It captures user dynamic interest and non-linear spatial dependencies in itinerary recommendations. The proposed model has two steps, where the candidate selection policy generates a set of personalised candidate POIs based on user interest and the itinerary construction step maximises user interest within budget time. To recommend an appropriate candidate set, we propose a multi-head, attention-based transformer to leverage periodic trends and recent activities to capture user dynamic preferences. We also introduce a new co-visiting patterns-based graph convolutional network (GCN) model to capture user non-linear spatial dependencies. To construct the full itinerary from the dynamic candidate sets, we apply greedy policy that incrementally constructs itineraries within the budget time which aims to maximise user interest and minimize queuing time. Experimental results show that the proposed deep learning model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in itinerary recommendation in four theme parks and four cities datasets. The proposed model outperforms the baselines in itinerary recommendation from 7.79% to 26.28% on various datasets in terms of F1-score value. We also show that the proposed candidate generation approach outperforms the state-of-the-art next POI recommendation models in eight real datasets. The proposed model outperforms the baselines on average by 11.29 % in terms of F1-score@5 values and 9.08% in terms of F1-score@10 values. We have publicly shared our source code at GitHub 1 for the reproducibility of our proposed model.

Complex social event summarization is a problem which has been important for real-world applications, including crisis management, rumor control and government policy tracking. However, in many critical situations, social events are complex and context-sensitive, which demands the online summarization of social events in an integrated manner. Motivated by this, we propose an online complex social event summarization approach, namely SOMA, which summarizes the complex social events over multiple attributes including media content and contexts simultaneously. The evaluation shows that our proposed approach outperforms the existing solutions for event summarizaiton in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.

Point-of-interest (POI) recommendation considers spatio-temporal factors like distance, peak hours, and user check-ins. Given their influence on both consumer experience and POI business, it’s crucial to consider fairness from multiple perspectives. Unfortunately, these systems often provide less accurate recommendations to inactive users and less exposure to unpopular POIs. This paper develops a post-filter method that includes provider and consumer fairness in existing models, aiming to balance fairness metrics like item exposure with performance metrics such as precision and distance. Experiments show that a linear scoring model for provider fairness in re-scoring items offers the best balance between performance and long-tail exposure, sometimes without much precision loss. Addressing consumer fairness by recommending more popular POIs to inactive users increased precision in some models and datasets. However, combinations that reached the Pareto front of consumer and provider fairness resulted in the lowest precision values, highlighting that tradeoffs depend greatly on the model and dataset.

Micro-mobility services (e.g., e-bikes, e-scooters) are increasingly popular among urban communities, being a flexible transport option that brings both opportunities and challenges. As a growing mode of transportation, insights gained from micro-mobility usage data are valuable in policy formulation and improving the quality of services. Existing research analyses patterns and features associated with usage distributions in different localities, and focuses on either temporal or spatial aspects. In this paper, we employ a combination of methods that analyse both spatial and temporal characteristics related to e-scooter trips in a more granular level, enabling observations at different time frames and local geographical zones that prior analysis wasn’t able to do. The insights obtained from anonymised, restricted data on shared e-scooter rides show the applicability of the employed method on regulated, privacy preserving micro-mobility trip data. Our results showed population density is the topmost important feature, and it associates with e-scooter usage positively. Population owning motor vehicles is negatively associated with shared e-scooter trips, suggesting a reduction in e-scooter usage among motor vehicle owners. Furthermore, we found that the effect of humidity is more important than precipitation in predicting hourly e-scooter trip count. Buffer analysis showed, nearly 29% trips were stopped, and 27% trips were started on the footpath, revealing higher utilisation of footpaths for parking e-scooters in Melbourne.

First developed to rank website relevance, PageRank has become ubiquitous in many areas of graph machine learning including deep learning. We demonstrate that a number of recently published deep graph neural networks are qualitatively equivalent to shallow networks utilizing Personalized PageRank (PPR), and that their performance improvements over existing PPR implementations can be fully explained by hyperparameter choices. We also show that PPR with these hyperparameters outperform more recently published sophisticated variations of PPR-based graph neural networks, and present efficient implementations that reduce training times and memory requirements while improving scalability.

Abstract Knowledge graphs (KGs) are becoming essential resources for many downstream applications. However, their incompleteness may limit their potential. Thus, continuous curation is needed to mitigate this problem. One of the strategies to address this problem is KG alignment, i.e., forming a more complete KG by merging two or more KGs. This paper proposes i-Align, an interpretable KG alignment model. Unlike the existing KG alignment models, i-Align provides an explanation for each alignment prediction while maintaining high alignment performance. Experts can use the explanation to check the correctness of the alignment prediction. Thus, the high quality of a KG can be maintained during the curation process (e.g., the merging process of two KGs). To this end, a novel Transformer-based Graph Encoder (Trans-GE) is proposed as a key component of i-Align for aggregating information from entities’ neighbors (structures). Trans-GE uses Edge-gated Attention that combines the adjacency matrix and the self-attention matrix to learn a gating mechanism to control the information aggregation from the neighboring entities. It also uses historical embeddings, allowing Trans-GE to be trained over mini-batches, or smaller sub-graphs, to address the scalability issue when encoding a large KG. Another component of i-Align is a Transformer encoder for aggregating entities’ attributes. This way, i-Align can generate explanations in the form of a set of the most influential attributes/neighbors based on attention weights. Extensive experiments are conducted to show the power of i-Align. The experiments include several aspects, such as the model’s effectiveness for aligning KGs, the quality of the generated explanations, and its practicality for aligning large KGs. The results show the effectiveness of i-Align in these aspects.

Complex social event summarization is a problem which has been shown having great utility for real-world applications, including crisis management, rumor control and government policy tracking. In recent years there has been significant research effort spent on effectively extracting meaningful textual descriptions of an event. However, in many critical situations, social events are complex and context-sensitive, which demands the online summarization of social events in an integrated manner. In this paper, we propose the first online complex social event summarization approach, namely SOMA, which summarizes the complex social events over multiple attributes including media content and contexts simultaneously. Specifically, we first propose a deep learning model that comprehensively summarizes events in regards to the text description and locations that they appear in, by utilizing their hidden connections in posts. We then propose a summary generator over time, text and location to achieve a maximal coverage of the summary over the original social event and minimal redundancy of the summary. Furthermore, we propose a location estimation method to address the location sparsity issue of complex events by mining the correlation between text and location. The evaluation over four real-event datasets and three benchmark datasets shows that our proposed approach outperforms the existing solutions for event summarizaiton in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.

Event popularity prediction over social media is crucial for estimating information propagation scope, decision making, and emergency prevention. It has been widely inves-tigated by existing approaches focusing on predicting single attribute occurrences which are not comprehensive enough for representing complex social event propagation. Motivated by this, we propose a novel hashtag-influence-based event popularity prediction by mining the impact of an influential hashtag set on the event propagation. We have conducted extensive experiments to prove the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.

Disentangled representation learning offers useful properties such as dimension reduction and interpretability, which are essential to modern deep learning approaches. Although deep learning techniques have been widely applied to spatio-temporal data mining, there has been little attention to further disentangle the latent features and understanding their contribution to the model performance, particularly their mutual information and correlation across features. In this study, we adopt two state-of-the-art disentangled representation learning methods and apply them to three large-scale public spatio-temporal datasets. To evaluate their performance, we propose an internal evaluation metric focusing on the degree of correlations among latent variables of the learned representations and the prediction performance of the downstream tasks. Empirical results show that our modified method can learn disentangled representations that achieve the same level of performance as existing state-of-the-art ST deep learning methods in a spatio-temporal sequence forecasting problem. Additionally, we find that our methods can be used to discover real-world spatial-temporal semantics to describe the variables in the learned representation.

Point-of-interest (POI) recommendation is a challenging problem due to different contextual information and a wide variety of human mobility patterns. Prior studies focus on recommendation that considers user travel spatiotemporal and sequential patterns behaviours. These studies do not pay attention to user personal interests, which is a significant factor for POI recommendation. Besides user interests, queuing time also plays a significant role in affecting user mobility behaviour, e.g., having to queue a long time to enter a POI might reduce visitor's enjoyment. Recently, attention-based recurrent neural networks-based approaches show promising performance in the next POI recommendation task. However, they are limited to single head attention, which can have difficulty in finding the appropriate user mobility behaviours considering complex relationships among POI spatial distances, POI check-in time, user interests and POI queuing times. In this research work, we are the first to consider queuing time and user interest awareness factors for next POI recommendation. We demonstrate how it is non-trivial to recommend a next POI and simultaneously predict its queuing time. To solve this problem, we propose a multi-task, multi-head attention transformer model called TLR-M_UI. The model recommends the next POIs to the target users and predicts queuing time to access the POIs simultaneously by considering user mobility behaviours. The proposed model utilises POIs description-based user personal interest that can also solve the new categorical POI cold start problem. Extensive experiments on six real-world datasets show that the proposed models outperform the state-of-the-art baseline approaches in terms of precision, recall, and F1-score evaluation metrics. The model also predicts and minimizes the queuing time. For the reproducibility of the proposed model, we have publicly shared our implementation code at GitHub (https://github.com/sajalhalder/TLR-M_UI).

Abstract Personalized itinerary recommendation has garnered wide research interests for their ubiquitous applications. Recommending personalized itineraries is complex because of the large number of points of interest (POI) to consider in order to construct an itinerary based on visitors’ interest and preference, time budget and uncertain queuing time. Previous studies typically aim to plan itineraries that maximize POI popularity, visitors’ interest and minimize queuing time. However, existing solutions may not reflect visitor preferences because when creating itineraries, they prefer to recommend POIs with short prior visiting periods. These recommendations can conflict with real-life scenarios as visitors typically spend less time at POIs that they do not enjoy, thus leading to the inclusion of unsuitable POIs. Moreover, constructing itineraries based on selected POIs is a challenging and time-consuming process. Existing approaches involve searching through a large number of non-optimal, duplicate itineraries that are time-consuming to review and generate. To address these issues, we propose an adaptive Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS)-based reinforcement learning algorithmEffiTourRecusing an effective POI selection strategy by giving preference to POIs with long visiting times and short queuing times along with high POI popularity and visitor interest. In addition, to reduce non-optimal and duplicated itineraries generation, we propose an efficient MCTS search pruning technique to explore a smaller, more promising portion of solution space. Experiment results in real theme park datasets show clear advantages of our proposed method over baselines, where our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art by 20.89 to 52.32% in precision, 8.36 to 21.35% in F1-score and 40.00 to 67.64% in execution time.

Event popularity prediction over social media is crucial for estimating information propagation scope, decision making, and emergency prevention. However, existing approaches only focus on predicting the occurrences of single attribute such as a message, a hashtag or an image, which are not comprehensive enough for representing complex social event propagation. In this paper, we predict the event popularity, where an event is described as a set of messages containing multiple hashtags. We propose a novel hashtag-influence-based event popularity prediction by mining the impact of an influential hashtag set on the event propagation. Specifically, we first propose a hashtag-influence-based cascade model to select the influential hashtags over an event hashtag graph built by the pairwise hashtag similarity and the topic distribution of event-related hashtags. A novel measurement is proposed to identify the hashtag influence of an event over its content and social impacts. A hashtag correlation-based algorithm is proposed to optimize the seed selection in a greedy manner. Then, we propose an event-fitting boosting model to predict the event popularity by embedding the feature importance over events into the XGBOOST model. Moreover, we propose an event-structure-based method, which incrementally updates the prediction model over social streams. We have conducted extensive experiments to prove the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.

Existing parking recommendation solutions mainly focus on finding and suggesting parking spaces based on the unoccupied options only. However, there are other factors associated with parking spaces that can influence someone’s choice of parking such as fare, parking rule, walking distance to destination, travel time, likelihood to be unoccupied at a given time. More importantly, these factors may change over time and conflict with each other which makes the recommendations produced by current parking recommender systems ineffective. In this paper, we propose a novel problem called multi-objective parking recommendation. We present a solution by designing a multi-objective parking recommendation engine called MoParkeR that considers various conflicting factors together. Specifically, we utilise a non-dominated sorting technique to calculate a set of Pareto-optimal solutions, consisting of recommended trade-off parking spots. We conduct extensive experiments using two real-world datasets to show the applicability of our multi-objective recommendation methodology.

To provide effective services for intelligent transportation systems (ITS), such as optimizing ride services and recommending trips, it is important to predict the distributions of passenger flows from various origins to destinations. However, existing crowd flow prediction models have not sufficiently addressed this problem, and most methods have only focused on in and out flows of individual regions. The main challenges of origin-destination (OD) crowd flow prediction are diverse flow patterns across city networks and data sparsity. To solve these problems, we propose a Multi Attention 3D Residual Network (MAThR) to predict city-wide OD crowd flows. In particular, we develop a multi-component 3D residual structure with a novel global self-attention mechanism to dynamically aggregate the OD spatial-temporal dependencies, by modeling three components: contextual information of the region, and long and short term periodic crowd flows. For each component, we design a tensor criss-cross self-attention block, which can simultaneously discover the global and local correlation of spatial (where), temporal (when) and contextual (which) information between all OD pairs. Evaluation on real-world crowd flow data demonstrates the advantages of our MAThR method on prediction accuracy, compared to other existing state-of-the-art methods.

The ubiquity of personal sensing devices has enabled the collection of large, diverse, and fine-grained spatio-temporal datasets. These datasets facilitate numerous applications from traffic monitoring and management to location-based services. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in profiling individuals' movements for personalized services based on fine-grained trajectory data. Most approaches identify the most representative paths of a user by analyzing coarse location information, e.g., frequently visited places. However, even for trips that share the same origin and destination, individuals exhibit a variety of behaviors (e.g., a school drop detour, a brief stop at a supermarket). The ability to characterize and compare the variability of individuals' fine-grained movement behavior can greatly support location-based services and smart spatial sampling strategies. We propose a TRip DIversity Measure --TRIM – that quantifies the regularity of users' path choice between an origin and destination. TRIM effectively captures the extent of the diversity of the paths that are taken between a given origin and destination pair, and identifies users with distinct movement patterns, while facilitating the comparison of the movement behavior variations between users. Our experiments using synthetic and real datasets and across geographies show the effectiveness of our method.

Itinerary planning is one of the most important tasks in tourism. A well-planned itinerary enhances the tourist experience and their visit satisfaction in new cities. However, the task of planning personalized tour itineraries is complicated by tourists with different interest preferences. Furthermore, there is an added complexity of recommending an itinerary with discrete budget, time and cost. Due to an increase in web-technologies and online geo-location services, there is emerging research targeting itinerary recommendation based on each tourist's interest, preferences and trip constraints. While several research works consider tourist interest, they adopt a simple measure based on the number of times a tourist has visited a place or the number of photos taken by the tourist at a place. Our research proposes an improved sentiment-aware personalized tour planner that considers each tourist's interests based on his/her sentiments on specific categories relative to his/her overall preferences. Unlike the previous approaches that do not consider the actual opinion based preferences, our proposed approach determines user interests based on their sentiments associated with their written text about a place of their visit. This interest measure is based on the intuition that users are more likely to post favorable comments about places they like. Using a dataset from Twitter, we compare our proposed algorithm against the baseline and experimental results show that our algorithm obtained superior performance in terms of tour precision, recall, Fl-score and overall popularity.

The prediction of flight delays plays a significantly important role for airlines and travellers because flight delays cause not only tremendous economic loss but also potential security risks. In this work, we aim to integrate multiple data sources to predict the departure delay of a scheduled flight. Different from previous work, we are the first group, to our best knowledge, to take advantage of airport situational awareness map, which is defined as airport traffic complexity (ATC), and combine the proposed ATC factors with weather conditions and light information. Features engineering methods and most state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms are applied to a large real-world data sources. We reveal a couple of factors at the airport which has a significant impact on flight departure delay time. The prediction results show that the proposed factors are the main reasons behind the flight delays. Using our proposed framework, an improvement in accuracy for flight departure delay prediction is obtained.

With the increasing popularity of e-commerce, the number of product-related queries generated by customers is growing. Answering these queries manually in real time is infeasible, and so automatic question-answering systems can be immensely helpful. Product queries are, however, very different from open-domain questions: they tend to be product-specific and the answers they demand can be very subjective. Previous research suggests that reviews are a valuable resource for answering product queries, but a key challenge is the language mismatch between user queries and reviews. To address this, we propose two neural models that discover relevant reviews for answering product queries. We demonstrate that our best model produces strong performance, outperforming state-of-the-art systems by consistently finding the most relevant reviews for product queries.

We learn user preferences from ratings and reviews by using multi-task learning (MTL) of rating prediction and summarization of item reviews. Reviews of an item tend to describe detailed user preferences (e.g., the cast, genre, or screenplay of a movie). A summary of such a review or a rating describes an overall user experience of the item. Our objective is to learn latent vectors which are shared across rating prediction and review summary generation. Additionally, the learned latent vectors and the generated summary act as explanations for the recommendation. Our MTL-based approach J3R uses a multi-layer perceptron for rating prediction, combined with pointer-generator networks with attention mechanism for the summarization component. We provide empirical evidence for joint learning of rating prediction and summary generation being beneficial for recommendation by conducting experiments on the Yelp dataset and six domains of the Amazon 5-core dataset. Additionally, we provide two ways of explanations visualizing (a) the user vectors on different topics of a domain, computed from our J3R approach and (b) a ten-word review summary of a review and the attention highlights generated on the review based on the user-item vectors

Diffusion models are powerful tools for understanding the spread of diverse content such as information, opinions and ideas through social networks. Although these models have been successfully used to study the spreading dynamics such as viral marketing, there are many real scenarios (e.g. vaccination, evacuation) that require a more complex model. Hence, we propose a new hybrid framework that combines diffusion modelling with cognitive agent modelling. The hybrid, generic framework is grounded on BDI (Belief-Desire-Intention), an advanced, efficient cognitive agent framework. We demonstrate our framework to a wildfire evacuation case study consisting of 5,000 agents. We then compare and analyse the diffusion outcomes of our model against two baseline models, the standard Linear Threshold (LT) model and a slightly modified version of the LT model, across 17 different input configurations. The results show (statistically) significant differences with the baselines for the majority of the configurations, highlighting the need for cognitive agents in diffusion modelling. The framework presented here provides the basis for modelling complex reasoning to capture diffusion phenomena in complex and dynamic social systems.

Blockmodelling is an important technique for detecting underlying patterns in graphs. However, existing blockmodelling algorithms do not provide the user with any explicit control to specify which patterns might be of interest. Furthermore, existing algorithms focus on finding standard community structures in graphs, and are likely to overlook informative but more complex patterns, such as hierarchical or ring blockmodel structures. In this paper, we propose a generic constraint programming framework for blockmodelling, which allows a user to specify and search for complex blockmodel patterns in graphs. Our proposed framework can be incorporated into existing iterative blockmodelling algorithms, operating as a hybrid optimization scheme that provides high flexibility and expressiveness. We demonstrate the power of our framework for discovering complex patterns, via experiments over a range of synthetic and real data sets.

Traditionally, recommender systems modelled the physical and cyber contextual influence on people's moving, querying, and browsing behaviors in isolation. Yet, searching, querying, and moving behaviors are intricately linked, especially indoors. Here, we introduce a tripartite location-query-browse graph (LQB) for nuanced contextual recommendations. The LQB graph consists of three kinds of nodes: locations, queries, and Web domains. Directed connections only between heterogeneous nodes represent the contextual influences, while connections of homogeneous nodes are inferred from the contextual influences of the other nodes. This tripartite LQB graph is more reliable than any monopartite or bipartite graph in contextual location, query, and Web content recommendations. We validate this LQB graph in an indoor retail scenario with extensive dataset of three logs collected from over 120,000 anonymized, opt-in users over a 1-year period in a large inner-city mall in Sydney, Australia. We characterize the contextual influences that correspond to the arcs in the LQB graph, and evaluate the usefulness of the LQB graph for location, query, and Web content recommendations. The experimental results show that the LQB graph successfully captures the contextual influence and significantly outperforms the state of the art in these applications.

Personalized itinerary recommendation is a complex and time-consuming problem, due to the need to recommend popular attractions that are aligned to the interest preferences of a tourist, and to plan these attraction visits as an itinerary that has to be completed within a specific time limit. Furthermore, many existing itinerary recommendation systems do not automatically determine and consider queuing times at attractions in the recommended itinerary, which varies based on the time of visit to the attraction, e.g., longer queuing times at peak hours. To solve these challenges, we propose the PersQ algorithm for recommending personalized itineraries that take into consideration attraction popularity, user interests and queuing times. We also implement a framework that utilizes geo-tagged photos to derive attraction popularity, user interests and queuing times, which PersQ uses to recommend personalized and queue-aware itineraries. We demonstrate the effectiveness of PersQ in the context of five major theme parks, based on a Flickr dataset spanning nine years. Experimental results show that PersQ outperforms various state-of-the-art baselines, in terms of various queuing-time related metrics, itinerary popularity, user interest alignment, recall, precision and F1-score.

There has been a growing interest in recommending trips for tourists using location-based social networks. The challenge of trip recommendation not only lies in searching for relevant points-of-interest (POIs) to form a personalized trip, but also selecting the best time of day to visit the POIs. Popular POIs can be too crowded during peak times, resulting in long queues and delays. In this work, we propose the Personalized Crowd-aware Trip Recommendation (PersCT) algorithm to recommend personalized trips that also avoid the most crowded times of the POIs. We model the problem as an extension of the Orienteering Problem with multiple constraints. We extract user interests by collaborative filtering and we propose an extension of the Ant Colony Optimisation algorithm to merge user interests with POI popularity and crowdedness data to recommend trips. We evaluate our algorithm using foot traffic information obtained from a real-life pedestrian sensor dataset and user travel histories extracted from a Flickr photo dataset. We show that our algorithm out-performs several benchmarks in achieving a balance between conflicting objectives by satisfying user interests while reducing the crowdedness of the trips.

The growth in pervasive network infrastructure called the Internet of Things (IoT) enables a wide range of physical objects and environments to be monitored in fine spatial and temporal detail. The detailed, dynamic data that are collected in large quantities from sensor devices provide the basis for a variety of applications. Automatic interpretation of these evolving large data is required for timely detection of interesting events. This article develops and exemplifies two new relatives of the visual assessment of tendency (VAT) and improved visual assessment of tendency (iVAT) models, which uses cluster heat maps to visualize structure in static datasets. One new model is initialized with a static VAT/iVAT image, and then incrementally (hence inc-VAT/inc-iVAT) updates the current minimal spanning tree (MST) used by VAT with an efficient edge insertion scheme. Similarly, dec-VAT/dec-iVAT efficiently removes a node from the current VAT MST. A sequence of inc-iVAT/dec-iVAT images can be used for (visual) anomaly detection in evolving data streams and for sliding window based cluster assessment for time series data. The method is illustrated with four real datasets (three of them being smart city IoT data). The evaluation demonstrates the algorithms’ ability to successfully isolate anomalies and visualize changing cluster structure in the streaming data.

There have been a large number of external validity indices proposed for cluster validity. One such class of cluster comparison indices is the information theoretic measures, due to their strong mathematical foundation and their ability to detect non-linear relationships. However, they are devised for evaluating crisp (hard) partitions. In this paper, we generalize eight information theoretic crisp indices to soft clusterings, so that they can be used with partitions of any type (i.e., crisp or soft, with soft including fuzzy, probabilistic and possibilistic cases). We present experimental results to demonstrate the effectiveness of the generalized information theoretic indices.

Graphs are a powerful representation of relational data, such as social and biological networks. Often, these entities form groups and are organised according to a latent structure. However, these groupings and structures are generally unknown and it can be difficult to identify them. Graph clustering is an important type of approach used to discover these vertex groups and the latent structure within graphs. One type of approach for graph clustering is non-negative matrix factorisation However, the formulations of existing factorisation approaches can be overly relaxed and their groupings and results consequently difficult to interpret, may fail to discover the true latent structure and groupings, and converge to extreme solutions. In this paper, we propose a new formulation of the graph clustering problem that results in clusterings that are easy to interpret. Combined with a novel algorithm, the clusterings are also more accurate than state-of-the-art algorithms for both synthetic and real datasets.

Most current mutual information (MI) based feature selection techniques are greedy in nature thus are prone to sub-optimal decisions. Potential performance improvements could be gained by systematically posing MI-based feature selection as a global optimization problem. A rare attempt at providing a global solution for the MI-based feature selection is the recently proposed Quadratic Programming Feature Selection (QPFS) approach. We point out that the QPFS formulation faces several non-trivial issues, in particular, how to properly treat feature `self-redundancy' while ensuring the convexity of the objective function. In this paper, we take a systematic approach to the problem of global MI-based feature selection. We show how the resulting NP-hard global optimization problem could be efficiently approximately solved via spectral relaxation and semi-definite programming techniques. We experimentally demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of these novel feature selection frameworks.

Blockmodelling is an important technique in social network analysis for discovering the latent structure in graphs. A blockmodel partitions the set of vertices in a graph into groups, where there are either many edges or few edges between any two groups. For example, in the reply graph of a question and answer forum, blockmodelling can identify the group of experts by their many replies to questioners, and the group of questioners by their lack of replies among themselves but many replies from experts.

Conventional non-negative tensor factorization (NTF) methods assume there is only one tensor that needs to be decomposed to low-rank factors. However, in practice data are usually generated from different time periods or by different class labels, which are represented by a sequence of multiple tensors associated with different labels. This raises the problem that when one needs to analyze and compare multiple tensors, existing NTF is unsuitable for discovering all potentially useful patterns: 1) if one factorizes each tensor separately, the common information shared by the tensors is lost in the factors, and 2) if one concatenates these tensors together and forms a larger tensor to factorize, the intrinsic discriminative subspaces that are unique to each tensor are not captured. The cause of such an issue is from the fact that conventional factorization methods handle data observations in an unsupervised way, which only considers features and not labels of the data. To tackle this problem, in this paper we design a novel factorization algorithm called CDNTF (common and discriminative subspace non-negative tensor factorization), which takes both features and class labels into account in the factorization process. CDNTF uses a set of labelled tensors as input and computes both their common and discriminative subspaces simultaneously as output. We design an iterative algorithm that solves the common and discriminative subspace factorization problem with a proof of convergence. Experiment results on solving graph classification problems demonstrate the power and the effectiveness of the subspaces discovered by our method.

In large and complex graphs of social, chemical/biological, or other relations, frequent substructures are commonly shared by different graphs or by graphs evolving through different time periods. Tensors are natural representations of these complex time-evolving graph data. A factorization of a tensor provides a high-quality low-rank compact basis for each dimension of the tensor, which facilitates the interpretation of frequent substructures of the original graphs. However, the high computational cost of tensor factorization makes it infeasible for conventional tensor factorization methods to handle large graphs that evolve frequently with time. To address this problem, in this paper we propose a novel iterative tensor factorization (ITF) method whose time complexity is linear in the cardinalities of all dimensions of a tensor. This low time complexity means that when using tensors to represent dynamic graphs, the computational cost of ITF is linear in the size (number of edges/vertices) of graphs and is also linear in the number of time periods over which the graph evolves. More importantly, an error estimation of ITF suggests that its factorization correctness is comparable to that of the standard factorization method. We empirically evaluate our method on publication networks and chemical compound graphs, and demonstrate that ITF is an order of magnitude faster than the conventional method and at the same time preserves factorization quality. To the best of our knowledge, this research is the first work that uses important frequent substructures to speed up tensor factorizations for mining dynamic graphs.

Existing graph compression techniquesmostly focus on static graphs. However for many practical graphs such as social networks the edge weights frequently change over time. This phenomenon raises the question of how to compress dynamic graphs while maintaining most of their intrinsic structural patterns at each time snapshot. In this paper we show that the encoding cost of a dynamic graph is proportional to the heterogeneity of a three dimensional tensor that represents the dynamic graph. We propose an effective algorithm that compresses a dynamic graph by reducing the heterogeneity of its tensor representation, and at the same time also maintains a maximum lossy compression error at any time stamp of the dynamic graph. The bounded compression error benefits compressed graphs in that they retain good approximations of the original edge weights, and hence properties of the original graph (such as shortest paths) are well preserved. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that compresses weighted dynamic graphs with bounded lossy compression error at any time snapshot of the graph.

Blockmodelling is an important technique for decomposing graphs into sets of roles. Vertices playing the same role have similar patterns of interactions with vertices in other roles. These roles, along with the role to role interactions, can succinctly summarise the underlying structure of the studied graphs. As the underlying graphs evolve with time, it is important to study how their blockmodels evolve too. This will enable us to detect role changes across time, detect different patterns of interactions, for example, weekday and weekend behaviour, and allow us to study how the structure in the underlying dynamic graph evolves. To date, there has been limited research on studying dynamic blockmodels. They focus on smoothing role changes between adjacent time instances. However, this approach can overfit during stationary periods where the underling structure does not change but there is random noise in the graph. Therefore, an approach to a) find blockmodels across spans of time and b) to find the stationary periods is needed. In this paper, we propose an information theoretic framework, SeqiBloc, combined with a change point detection approach to achieve a) and b). In addition, we propose new vertex equivalence definitions that include time, and show how they relate back to our information theoretic approach. We demonstrate their usefulness and superior accuracy over existing work on synthetic and real datasets.

Data mining techniques for understanding how graphs evolve over time have become increasingly important. Evolving graphs arise naturally in diverse applications such as computer network topologies, multiplayer games and medical imaging. A natural and interesting problem in evolving graph analysis is the discovery of compact subgraphs that change in a similar manner. Such subgraphs are known as regions of correlated change and they can both summarise change patterns in graphs and help identify the underlying events causing these changes. However, previous techniques for discovering regions of correlated change suffer from limited scalability, making them unsuitable for analysing the evolution of very large graphs. In this paper, we introduce a new algorithm called ciForager, that addresses this scalability challenge and offers considerable improvements. The efficiency of ciForager is based on the use of new incremental techniques for detecting change, as well as the use of Voronoi representations for efficiently determining distance. We experimentally show that ciForager can achieve speedups of up to 1000 times over previous approaches. As a result, it becomes feasible for the first time to discover regions of correlated change in extremely large graphs, such as the entire BGP routing topology of the Internet.