Explainable transaction risk analysis is a challenge for traditional deep learning models, which only predict suspicious transactions without explanations. Current explainable methods rely on hand-crafted rules and lack the ability to automatically generate language-based explanations. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promise due to their reasoning and text generation abilities but struggle with domain knowledge and hallucinations, making risk analysis difficult. Specifically, LLMs face: (1) insufficient adaptation to transaction data analysis, and (2) ineffective knowledge retrieval methods that ignore the rich graph structure of transaction data. To address these issues, we propose the Dual Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Dual-gRAG) framework, which utilizes dual retrieval: expert knowledge and reasoning case retrieval. Expert knowledge compensates for domain gaps, while reasoning case retrieval provides step-wise analysis guidance. We incorporate both graph-structured features and semantic features into the retrieval process to enhance the effectiveness of the retrieval. Extensive experiments show that Dual-gRAG improves LLMs' risk analysis capabilities, achieving a 15% increase in different metrics.

Discrete-Time Dynamic Graphs (DTDGs), which are prevalent in real-world implementations and notable for their ease of data acquisition, have garnered considerable attention from both academic researchers and industry practitioners. The representation learning of DTDGs has been extensively applied to model the dynamics of temporally changing entities and their evolving connections. Currently, DTDG representation learning predominantly relies on GNN+RNN architectures, which manifest the inherent limitations of both Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). GNNs suffer from the over-smoothing issue as the models architecture goes deeper, while RNNs struggle to capture long-term dependencies effectively. GNN+RNN architectures also grapple with scaling to large graph sizes and long sequences. Additionally, these methods often compute node representations separately and focus solely on individual node characteristics, thereby overlooking the behavior intersections between the two nodes whose link is being predicted, such as instances where the two nodes appear together in the same context or share common neighbors.

Drug combinations can cause adverse drug-drug interactions(DDIs). Identifying specific effects is crucial for developing safer therapies. Previous works on DDI event prediction have typically been limited to using labels of specific events as supervision, which renders them insufficient to address two significant challenges: (1) the bias caused by highly imbalanced event distribution where certain interaction types are vastly underrepresented. (2) the scarcity of labeled data for rare events, a pervasive issue where rare yet potentially critical interactions are often overlooked or under-explored due to limited available data. In response, we offer "DDIPrompt", an innovative solution inspired by the recent advancements in graph prompt learning. Our framework aims to address these issues by leveraging the intrinsic knowledge from pre-trained models, which can be efficiently deployed with minimal downstream data. Specifically, to solve the first challenge, DDIPrompt features a hierarchical pre-training strategy to foster a generalized and comprehensive understanding of drug properties. It captures intra-molecular structures through augmented links based on structural proximity between drugs, further learns inter-molecular interactions emphasizing edge connections rather than concrete catagories. For the second challenge, we implement a prototype-enhanced prompting mechanism during inference. This mechanism, refined by few-shot examples from each category, effectively harnesses the rich pre-training knowledge to enhance prediction accuracy, particularly for these rare but crucial interactions. Comprehensive evaluations on two benchmark datasets demonstrate DDIPrompt's SOTA performance, especially for those rare DDI events.

Community detection plays a pivotal role in network analysis, with applications in recommendation systems, anomaly detection, and biochemistry. However, traditional methods, while computationally efficient, often fall short in managing the complexities of real-world network structures. In contrast, deep learning approaches enhance accuracy but require substantial computational resources and task-specific architectures. This paper introduce GetCom, a novel three-phase "pre-train, generate, prompt" framework that integrates traditional methods and deep learning techniques. In the pre-training phase, GetCom acquires comprehensive understanding of community structures, which provides a solid foundation for the subsequent phases. During the generation phase, traditional community detection methods are employed to efficiently identify potential communities, which are subsequently refined in the prompt learning phase. This integration offers an efficient, accurate, and generalizable solution for community detection. Experiments on five real-world network datasets demonstrate that GetCom achieves state-of-the-art performance, with strong efficiency and generalization capabilities across diverse datasets and tasks.

Temporal Graph Networks (TGNs) have demonstrated their remarkable performance in modeling temporal interaction graphs. These works can generate temporal node representations by encoding the surrounding neighborhoods for the target node. However, an inherent limitation of existing TGNs is their reliance onfixed, hand-crafted rules for neighborhood encoding, overlooking the necessity for an adaptive and learnable neighborhood that can accommodate both personalization and temporal evolution across different timestamps. In this paper, we aim to enhance existing TGNs by introducing anadaptive neighborhood encoding mechanism. We present SEAN (Selective Encoding for Adaptive Neighborhood), a flexible plug-and-play model that can be seamlessly integrated with existing TGNs, effectively boosting their performance. To achieve this, we decompose the adaptive neighborhood encoding process into two phases: (i) representative neighbor selection, and (ii) temporal-aware neighborhood information aggregation. Specifically, we propose the Representative Neighbor Selector component, which automatically pinpoints the most important neighbors for the target node. It offers a tailored understanding of each node's unique surrounding context, facilitating personalization. Subsequently, we propose a Temporal-aware Aggregator, which synthesizes neighborhood aggregation by selectively determining the utilization of aggregation routes and decaying the outdated information, allowing our model to adaptively leverage both the contextually significant and current information during aggregation. We conduct extensive experiments by integrating SEAN into three representative TGNs, evaluating their performance on four public datasets and one financial benchmark dataset introduced in this paper. The results demonstrate that SEAN consistently leads to performance improvements across all models, achieving SOTA performance and exceptional robustness.

Targeted community detection aims to distinguish a particular type of community in the network. This is an important task with a lot of real-world applications, e.g., identifying fraud groups in transaction networks. Traditional community detection methods fail to capture the specific features of the targeted community and detect all types of communities indiscriminately. Semi-supervised community detection algorithms, emerged as a feasible alternative, are inherently constrained by their limited adaptability and substantial reliance on a large amount of labeled data, which demands extensive domain knowledge and manual effort.

Class imbalance is a well-recognized challenge in GNN-based fraud detection. Traditional methods like re-sampling and re-weighting address this issue by balancing class distribution. However, node class balancing with simple re-sampling or re-weighting may greatly distort the data distributions and eventually lead to the ineffective performance of GNNs. In this paper, we propose a novel approach named Graph Generative Node Augmentation (GGA), which improves GNN-based fraud detection models by augmenting synthetic nodes of the minority class. GGA utilizes the GAN framework to synthesize node features and related edges of fake fraudulent nodes. To introduce greater variety in the generated nodes, we employ an MLP for feature generation. We also introduce an attention module to encode feature-level information before graph convolutional layers for edge generation. Our empirical results on two real-world fraud datasets demonstrate that GGA improves the performance of GNN-based fraud detection models by a large margin with much fewer nodes than traditional class balance methods, and outperforms recent graph augmentation methods with the same number of synthetic nodes.

Online groups have become increasingly prevalent, providing users with space to share experiences and explore interests. Therefore, user-centric group discovery task, i.e., recommending groups to users can help both users' online experiences and platforms' long-term developments. Existing recommender methods can not deal with this task as modeling user-group participation into a bipartite graph overlooks their item-side interests. Although there exist a few works attempting to address this task, they still fall short in fully preserving the social context and ensuring effective interest representation learning.

Continuous-time dynamic graph modeling is a crucial task for many real-world applications, such as financial risk management and fraud detection. Though existing dynamic graph modeling methods have achieved satisfactory results, they still suffer from three key limitations, hindering their scalability and further applicability. i) Indiscriminate updating. For incoming edges, existing methods would indiscriminately deal with them, which may lead to more time consumption and unexpected noisy information. ii) Ineffective node-wise long-term modeling. They heavily rely on recurrent neural networks (RNNs) as a backbone, which has been demonstrated to be incapable of fully capturing node-wise long-term dependencies in event sequences. iii) Neglect of re-occurrence patterns. Dynamic graphs involve the repeated occurrence of neighbors that indicates their importance, which is disappointedly neglected by existing methods.

Graph collaborative filtering (GCF) is a popular technique for capturing high-order collaborative signals in recommendation systems. However, GCF's bipartite adjacency matrix, which defines the neighbors being aggregated based on user-item interactions, can be noisy for users/items with abundant interactions and insufficient for users/items with scarce interactions. Additionally, the adjacency matrix ignores user-user and item-item correlations, which can limit the scope of beneficial neighbors being aggregated.

Since group activities have become very common in daily life, there is an urgent demand for generating recommendations for a group of users, referred to as group recommendation task. Existing group recommendation methods usually infer groups’ preferences via aggregating diverse members’ interests. Actually, groups’ ultimate choice involves compromises between members, and finally, an agreement can be reached. However, existing individual information aggregation lacks a holistic group-level consideration, failing to capture the consensus information. Besides, their specific aggregation strategies either suffer from high computational costs or become too coarse-grained to make precise predictions.

Recently, aligning users among different social networks has received significant attention. However, most of the existing studies do not consider users' behavior information during the aligning procedure and thus still suffer from poor learning performance. In fact, we observe that social network alignment and user behavior analysis can benefit from each other. Motivated by such an observation, we propose to jointly study the social network alignment and user behavior analysis problem in this paper. We design a novel framework named BANANA-RGB. In this framework, to capture users' multi-scale behavior information in each social network, we train a variant of the hierarchical periodic memory network with personalized memorization. To leverage behavior analysis for social network alignment, we design a tensor fusion network-based alignment component to improve the performance. To further leverage social network alignment for behavior analysis, we design a gating-based cross-network behavior fusion component to integrate users' behavior information in different social networks based on the alignment result. We iteratively train the above two components to make the two tasks benefit from each other. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Optimization algorithms with momentum have been widely used for building deep learning models because of the fast convergence rate. Momentum helps accelerate Stochastic gradient descent in relevant directions in parameter updating, minifying the oscillations of the parameters update route. The gradient of each step in optimization algorithms with momentum is calculated by a part of the training samples, so there exists stochasticity, which may bring errors to parameter updates. In this case, momentum placing the influence of the last step to the current step with a fixed weight is obviously inaccurate, which propagates the error and hinders the correction of the current step. Besides, such a hyperparameter can be extremely hard to tune in applications as well. In this paper, we introduce a novel optimization algorithm, namely, Discriminative wEight on Adaptive Momentum (DEAM). Instead of assigning the momentum term weight with a fixed hyperparameter, DEAM proposes to compute the momentum weight automatically based on the discriminative angle. The momentum term weight will be assigned with an appropriate value that configures momentum in the current step. In this way, DEAM involves fewer hyperparameters. DEAM also contains a novel backtrack term, which restricts redundant updates when the correction of the last step is needed. The backtrack term can effectively adapt the learning rate and achieve the anticipatory update as well. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DEAM can achieve a faster convergence rate than the existing optimization algorithms in training the deep learning models of both convex and nonconvex situations.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown convincing performance in learning powerful node representations that preserve both node attributes and graph structural information. However, many GNNs encounter problems in effectiveness and efficiency when they are designed with a deeper network structure or handle large-sized graphs. Several sampling algorithms have been proposed for improving and accelerating the training of GNNs, yet they ignore understanding the source of GNNs performance gain. The measurement of information within graph data can help the sampling algorithms to keep high-value information while removing redundant information and even noise. In this paper, we propose a Metric-Guided (MeGuide) subgraph learning framework for GNNs. MeGuide employs two novel metrics: Feature Smoothness and Connection Failure Distance to guide the subgraph sampling and mini-batch based training. Feature Smoothness is designed for analyzing the feature of nodes to retain the most valuable information, while Connection Failure Distance can measure the structural information to control the size of subgraphs. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of MeGuide in training various GNNs on multiple data sets.

In order to model the evolution of user preference, we should learn user/item embeddings based on time-ordered item purchasing sequences, which is defined as Sequential Recommendation~(SR) problem. Existing methods leverage sequential patterns to model item transitions. However, most of them ignore crucial temporal collaborative signals, which are latent in evolving user-item interactions and coexist with sequential patterns. Therefore, we propose to unify sequential patterns and temporal collaborative signals to improve the quality of recommendation, which is rather challenging. Firstly, it is hard to simultaneously encode sequential patterns and collaborative signals. Secondly, it is non-trivial to express the temporal effects of collaborative signals.

Fraud detection is extremely critical for e-commerce business platforms. Utilizing graph structure data and identifying unexpected dense subgraphs as suspicious is a category of commonly used fraud detection methods. Among them, spectral methods solve the problem efficiently but hurt the performance due to the relaxed constraints. Heuristic methods cannot be accelerated with parallel computation and fail to control the scope of returned suspicious nodes. These drawbacks affect the real-world applications of existing graph-based methods. In this paper, we propose an Ensemble based Fraud DETection (ENSEMFDET) method to scale up fraud detection in bipartite graphs. By oversampling the graph and solving the subproblems, the ensemble approach further votes suspicious nodes without sacrificing the prediction accuracy. Extensive experiments have been done on real transaction data from JD.com and demonstrate the effectiveness, practicability, and scalability of ENSEMFDET.

Graphs such as social networks and molecular graphs are ubiquitous data structures in the real world. Due to their prevalence, it is of great research importance to extract meaningful patterns from graph structured data so that downstream tasks can be facilitated. Instead of designing hand-engineered features, graph representation learning has emerged to learn representations that can encode the abundant information about the graph. It has achieved tremendous success in various tasks such as node classification, link prediction, and graph classification and has attracted increasing attention in recent years.

The 4th Workshop on Heterogeneous Information Network Analysis and Applications (HENA 2021) is co-located with the 27th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners in the field and provide a forum for sharing new techniques and applications in heterogeneous information network analysis. This workshop has an exciting program that spans a number of subtopics, such as heterogeneous network embedding and graph neural networks, data mining techniques on heterogeneous information networks, and applications of heterogeneous information network analysis. The workshop program includes several invited speakers, lively discussion on emerging topics, and presentations of accepted research papers.

Citing comprehensive and correct related work is crucial in academic writing. It can not only support the author's claims but also help readers trace other related research papers. Nowadays, with the rapid increase in the number of scientific literatures, it has become increasingly challenging to search for high-quality citations and write the manuscript. In this paper, we present an automatic writing assistant model, AutoCite, which not only infers potentially related work but also automatically generates the citation context at the same time. Specifically, AutoCite involves a novel multi-modal encoder and a multi-task decoder architecture. Based on the multi-modal inputs, the encoder in AutoCite learns paper representations with both citation network structure and textual contexts. The multi-task decoder in AutoCite couples and jointly learns citation prediction and context generation in a unified manner. To effectively join the encoder and decoder, we introduce a novel representation fusion component, i.e., gated neural fusion, which feeds the multi-modal representation inputs from the encoder and creates outputs for the downstream multi-task decoder adaptively. Extensive experiments on five real-world citation network datasets validate the effectiveness of our model.

Network alignment aims at inferring a set of anchor links matching the shared entities between different information networks, which has become a prerequisite step for effective fusion of multiple information networks. In this paper, we will study the network alignment problem to fuse online social networks specifically. Social network alignment is extremely challenging to address due to several reasons, i.e., lack of training data, network heterogeneity and one-to-one constraint. Existing network alignment works usually require a large number of training instances, but such a demand can hardly be met in applications, as manual anchor link labeling is extremely expensive. Significantly different from other homogeneous network alignment works, information in online social networks is usually of heterogeneous categories, the incorporation of which in model building is not an easy task. Furthermore, the one-to-one cardinality constraint on anchor links renders their inference process intertwistingly correlated. To resolve these three challenges, a novel network alignment model, namely ActiveIter (Active Iterative Alignment), is introduced in this paper. The model ActiveIter defines a set of inter-network meta diagrams for anchor link feature extraction, adopts active learning for effective label query and uses greedy link selection for anchor link cardinality filtering. Extensive experiments were performed on a real-world aligned networks dataset, and the experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of ActiveIter compared with other state-of-the-art baseline methods.

Optimization algorithms with momentum, e.g., (ADAM) helps accelerate SGD in parameter updating, which can minify the oscillations of parameters update route. However, the fixed momentum weight (e.g., β1in ADAM) will propagate errors in momentum computing. Besides, such a hyperparameter can be extremely hard to tune in applications. In this paper, we introduce a novel optimization algorithm, namely Discriminative wEight on Adaptive Momentum (DEAM). DEAM proposes to compute the momentum weight automatically based on the discriminative angle. The momentum term weight will be assigned with an appropriate value which configures the influence of momentum in the current step. In addition, DEAM also contains a novel backtrack term, which restricts redundant updates when the correction of the last step is needed. The backtrack term can effectively adapt the learning rate and achieve the anticipatory update as well. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DEAM can achieve a faster convergence rate than the existing optimization algorithms in training various models. A full version of this paper can be accessed in [1].

Graph Neural Networks(GNNs), like GCN and GAT, have achieved great success in a number of supervised or semi-supervised tasks including node classification and link prediction. These existing graph neural networks can effectively encode neighborhood information of graph nodes through their message aggregating mechanisms. However, there are some unsupervised and structure-related tasks like community detection, which is a fundamental problem in network analysis that finds densely-connected groups of nodes and separates them from others in graphs. It is still difficult for these general-purposed GNNs to learn the needed structural information in these particular problems. To overcome the shortcomings of general-purposed graph representation learning methods, we propose the Community Deep Graph Infomax (CommDGI), a graph neural network designed to handle community detection problems. Inspired by the success of deep graph infomax in self-supervised graph learning, we design a novel mutual information mechanism to capture neighborhood as well as community information in graphs. A trainable clustering layer is employed to learn the community partition in an end-to-end manner. Disentangled representation learning is applied in our graph neural network so that the model can improve interpretability and generalization. Throughout the whole learning process, joint optimization is applied to learn the community-related node representations. The experimental results show that our algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art community detection methods.

In recent years, due to the booming development of online social networks, fake news for various commercial and political purposes has been appearing in large numbers and widespread in the online world. With deceptive words, online social network users can get infected by these online fake news easily, which has brought about tremendous effects on the offline society already. An important goal in improving the trustworthiness of information in online social networks is to identify the fake news timely. This paper aims at investigating the principles, methodologies and algorithms for detecting fake news articles, creators and subjects from online social networks and evaluating the corresponding performance. This paper addresses the challenges introduced by the unknown characteristics of fake news and diverse connections among news articles, creators and subjects. This paper introduces a novel gated graph neural network, namely FAKEDETECTOR. Based on a set of explicit and latent features extracted from the textual information, FAKEDETECTOR builds a deep diffusive network model to learn the representations of news articles, creators and subjects simultaneously. Extensive experiments have been done on a real-world fake news dataset to compare FAKEDETECTOR with several state-of-the-art models, and the experimental results are provided in the full-version of this paper at [13].

Social network alignment shows fundamental importance in a wide spectrum of applications. To the best of our knowledge, existing studies mainly focus on network alignment at the individual user level, requiring abundant common information between shared individual users. For the networks that cannot meet such requirements, social community structures actually provide complementary and critical information at a slightly coarse-grained level, alignment of which will provide additional information for user alignment. In turn, user alignment also reveals more clues for community alignment. Hence, in this paper, we introduce the problem of joint social network alignment, which aims to align users and communities across social networks simultaneously. Key challenges lie in that (1) how to learn the representations of both users and communities, and (2) how to make user alignment and community alignment benefit from each other. To address these challenges, we first elaborate on the characteristics of real-world networks with the notion of δ-hyperbolicity, and show the superiority of hyperbolic space for representing social networks. Then, we present a novel hyperbolic embedding approach for the joint social network alignment, referred to as Perfect, in a unified optimization. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show the superiority of Perfect in both user alignment and community alignment.

Graph representation learning has attracted lots of attention recently. Existing graph neural networks fed with the complete graph data are not scalable due to limited computation and memory costs. Thus, it remains a great challenge to capture rich information in large-scale graph data. Besides, these methods mainly focus on supervised learning and highly depend on node label information, which is expensive to obtain in the real world. As to unsupervised network embedding approaches, they overemphasize node proximity instead, whose learned representations can hardly be used in downstream application tasks directly. In recent years, emerging self-supervised learning provides a potential solution to address the aforementioned problems. However, existing self-supervised works also operate on the complete graph data and are biased to fit either global or very local (1-hop neighborhood) graph structures in defining the mutual information based loss terms. In this paper, a novel self-supervised representation learning method via Sub-graph Contrast, namely Subg-Con, is proposed by utilizing the strong correlation between central nodes and their sampled subgraphs to capture regional structure information. Instead of learning on the complete input graph data, with a novel data augmentation strategy, Subg-Con learns node representations through a contrastive loss defined based on subgraphs sampled from the original graph instead. Compared with existing graph representation learning approaches, Subg-Con has prominent performance advantages in weaker supervision requirements, model learning scalability, and parallelization. Extensive experiments verify both the effectiveness and the efficiency of our work compared with both classic and state-of-the-art graph representation learning approaches on multiple realworld large-scale benchmark datasets from different domains.

The explosive growth of fake news along with destructive effects on politics, economy, and public safety has increased the demand for fake news detection. Fake news on social media does not exist independently in the form of an article. Many other entities, such as news creators, news subjects, and so on, exist on social media and have relationships with news articles. Different entities and relationships can be modeled as a heterogeneous information network (HIN). In this paper, we attempt to solve the fake news detection problem with the support of a news-oriented HIN. We propose a novel fake news detection framework, namely Adversarial Active Learning-based Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network (AA-HGNN) which employs a novel hierarchical attention mechanism to perform node representation learning in the HIN. AA-HGNN utilizes an active learning framework to enhance learning performance, especially when facing the paucity of labeled data. An adversarial selector will be trained to query high-value candidates for the active learning framework. When the adversarial active learning is completed, AA-HGNN detects fake news by classifying news article nodes. Experiments with two real-world fake news datasets show that our model can outperform text-based models and other graph-based models when using less labeled data benefiting from the adversarial active learning. As a model with generalizability, AA-HGNN also has the ability to be widely used in other node classification-related applications on heterogeneous graphs.

Stationless bike-sharing systems such as Mobike are currently becoming extremely popular in China as well as some other big cities in the world. Compared to traditional bicycle-sharing systems, stationless bike-sharing systems do not need bike stations. Users can rent and return bikes at arbitrary locations through an App installed on their smart phones. Such a convenient and flexible bike-sharing mode greatly solves the last mile issue of the commuters, and better meets their real bike usage demand. However, it also poses new challenges for operators to manage the system. The first primary challenge is how to accurately estimate the real bike usage demand in different areas of a city and in different time intervals, which is crucial for the system planning and operation. This paper for the first time proposes a data driven approach for bike usage demand inference in stationless bike-sharing systems. The idea is that we first estimate the demands in some regions and time intervals from a small number of observed bike check-out/in data directly, and then use them as seeds to infer the region-level bike usage demands of an entire city. Specifically, we formulate this problem as a matrix completion task by modeling the bike usage demand as a matrix whose two dimensions are time intervals of a day and regions of a city, respectively. With the observation that POI distribution of a region is an important indicator to bike demand, we propose to utilize inductive matrix factorization by considering POIs as side information. As the bike usage data are highly correlated in both spatial and temporal dimensions, we also incorporate the spatial-temporal correlations as well as the balanced bike usage constraint into a joint optimization framework. We evaluate the proposed model on a large Mobike trip dataset collected from Beijing, and the experimental results show its superior performance by comparison with various baseline methods.

Cross-domain recommendation can alleviate the data sparsity problem in recommender systems. To transfer the knowledge from one domain to another, one can either utilize the neighborhood information or learn a direct mapping function. However, all existing methods ignore the high-order connectivity information in cross-domain recommendation area and suffer from the domain-incompatibility problem. In this paper, we propose a Joint Spectral Convolutional Network (JSCN) for cross-domain recommendation. JSCN will simultaneously operate multi-layer spectral convolutions on different graphs, and jointly learn a domain-invariant user representation with a domain adaptive user mapping module. As a result, the high-order comprehensive connectivity information can be extracted by the spectral convolutions and the information can be transferred across domains with the domain-invariant user mapping. The domain adaptive user mapping module can help the incompatible domains to transfer the knowledge across each other. Extensive experiments on 24 Amazon rating datasets show the effectiveness of JSCN in the cross-domain recommendation, with 9.2% improvement on recall and 36.4% improvement on MAP compared with state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available online1.

In recent years, many research works propose to embed the network structured data into a low-dimensional feature space, where each node will be represented as a feature vector. However, due to the detachment of the embedding process with external tasks, the learned embedding results by most existing embedding models can be ineffective for application tasks with specific objectives, e.g., community detection, network alignment or information diffusion. In this paper, we propose to study the application oriented heterogeneous social network embedding problem. Significantly different from the existing works, besides the network structure preservation, the problem should also incorporate the objectives of external applications in the objective function. To resolve the problem, we propose a novel network embedding framework, namely “application oriented network Embedding” (LATTE). In LATTE, the heterogeneous network structure can be applied to compute the node “diffusive proximity” scores, which capture both the local and global network structures. Based on these computed scores, LATTE learns the network representation feature vectors by extending the autoencoder model to the heterogeneous network scenario, which can also effectively unite the objectives of network embedding and external application tasks. Extensive experiments have been done on real-world heterogeneous social network datasets with community detection as an example task, and the experimental results have demonstrated the outstanding performance of LATTE. Experiental results on other tasks are provided in the full-version of this paper at [16].

In recent years, due to the booming development of online social networks, fake news for various commercial and political purposes has been appearing in large numbers and widespread in the online world. With deceptive words, online social network users can get infected by these online fake news easily, which has brought about tremendous effects on the offline society already. An important goal in improving the trustworthiness of information in online social networks is to identify the fake news timely. This paper aims at investigating the principles, methodologies and algorithms for detecting fake news articles, creators and subjects from online social networks and evaluating the corresponding performance. This paper addresses the challenges introduced by the unknown characteristics of fake news and diverse connections among news articles, creators and subjects. This paper introduces a novel automatic fake news credibility inference model, namely FakeDetector. Based on a set of explicit and latent features extracted from the textual information, FakeDetector builds a deep diffusive network model to learn the representations of news articles, creators and subjects simultaneously. Extensive experiments have been done on a real-world fake news dataset to compare FakeDetector with several state-of-the-art models, and the experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed model.

To enjoy more social network services, users nowadays are usually involved in multiple online sites at the same time. Aligned social networks provide more information to alleviate the problem of data insufficiency. In this paper, we target on the collective link prediction problem and aim to predict both the intra-network social links as well as the inter-network anchor links across multiple aligned social networks. It is not an easy task, and the major challenges involve the network characteristic difference problem and different directivity properties of the social and anchor links to be predicted. To address the problem, we propose an application oriented network embedding framework, Hierarchical Graph Attention based Network Embedding (HGANE), for collective link prediction over directed aligned networks. Very different from the conventional general network embedding models, HGANE effectively incorporates the collective link prediction task objectives into consideration. It learns the representations of nodes by aggregating information from both the intra-network neighbors (connected by social links) and inter-network partners (connected by anchor links). What's more, we introduce a hierarchical graph attention mechanism for the intra-network neighbors and inter-network partners respectively, which resolves the network characteristic differences and the link directivity challenges effectively. Extensive experiments have been conducted on real-world aligned networks datasets to demonstrate that our model outperformed the state-of-the-art baseline methods in addressing the collective link prediction problem by a large margin.

The third International Workshop on Heterogeneous Information Network Analysis and Applications is held in Beijing, China on November 3, 2019 and is co-located with the 28th International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. The goal of this workshop is to bring together people from these different areas and provide an opportunity for researchers and practitioners to share new techniques for identifying and analyzing relationships in networks that integrate multiple types or sources of information. This workshop has an exciting program that spans a number of subareas, including: network construction and mining, network embedding, information diffusion, knowledge graph analysis, community detection, parallel computing for network analysis, and network analysis applications. The program includes several invited speakers, lively discussion on emerging topics, and presentations of accepted original research papers.

Network alignment aims at inferring a set of anchor links matching the shared entities between different information networks, which has become a prerequisite step for effective fusion of multiple information networks. In this paper, we will study the network alignment problem to fuse online social networks specifically. Social network alignment is extremely challenging to address due to several reasons, i.e., lack of training data, network heterogeneity and one-to-one constraint. Existing network alignment works usually require a large number of training data, but such a demand can hardly be met in applications, as manual anchor link labeling is extremely expensive. Significantly different from other homogeneous network alignment works, information in online social networks is usually of heterogeneous categories, the incorporation of which in model building is not an easy task. Furthermore, the one-to-one cardinality constraint on anchor links renders their inference process intertwistingly correlated. To resolve these three challenges, a novel network alignment model, namely ActiveIter, is introduced in this paper. ActiveIter defines a set of inter-network meta diagrams for anchor link feature extraction, adopts active learning for effective label query and uses greedy link selection for anchor link cardinality filtering. Extensive experiments are conducted on real-world aligned networks datasets, and the experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of ActiveIter compared with other state-of-the-art baseline methods.

Exploiting historical data of users to make future predictions lives at the heart of building effective recommender systems (RS). Recent approaches for sequential recommendations often render past actions of a user into a sequence, seeking to capture the temporal dynamics in the sequence to predict the next item. However, the interests of users evolve over time together due to their mutual influence, and most of existing methods lack the ability to utilize the rich coevolutionary patterns available in underlying data represented by sequential graphs. In order to capture the co-evolving knowledge for sequential recommendations, we start from introducing an efficient spectral convolution operation to discover complex relationships between users and items from the spectral domain of a graph, where the hidden connectivity information of the graph can be revealed. Then, the spectral convolution is generalized into an recurrent method by utilizing gated mechanisms to model sequential graphs. Experimentally, we demonstrate the advantages of modeling co-evolving patterns, and Gated Spectral Units (GSUs) achieve state-of-the-art performance on several benchmark datasets.

Existing recommendation methods mostly learn fixed vectors for users and items in a low-dimensional continuous space, and then calculate the popular dot-product to derive user-item distances. However, these methods suffer from two drawbacks: (1) the data sparsity issue prevents from learning high-quality representations; and (2) the dot-product violates the crucial triangular inequality and therefore, results in a sub-optimal performance. In this work, in order to overcome the two aforementioned drawbacks, we propose Deep Distribution Network (DDN) to model users and items via Gaussian distributions. We argue that, compared to fixed vectors, distribution-based representations are more powerful to characterize users' uncertain interests and items' distinct properties. In addition, we propose a Wasserstein-based loss, in which the critical triangular inequality can be satisfied. In experiments, we evaluate DDN and comparative models on standard datasets. It is shown that DDN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models, demonstrating the advantages of the proposed distribution-based representations and wassertein loss.

In the era of big data, logistic planning can be made data-driven to take advantage of accumulated knowledge in the past. While in the movie industry, movie planning can also exploit the existing online movie knowledge library to achieve better results. However, it is ineffective to solely rely on conventional heuristics for movie planning, due to a large number of existing movies and various real-world factors that contribute to the success of each movie, such as the movie genre, available budget, production team (involving actor, actress, director, and writer), etc. In this paper, we study a "Blockbuster Planning" (BP) problem to learn from previous movies and plan for low budget yet high return new movies in a totally data-driven fashion. After a thorough investigation of an online movie knowledge library, a novel movie planning framework "Blockbuster Planning with Maximized Movie Configuration Acquaintance" (BigMovie) is introduced in this paper. From the investment perspective, BigMovie maximizes the estimated gross of the planned movies with a given budget. Meanwhile, from the production team's perspective, BigMovie is able to formulate an optimized team with people/movie genres that team members are acquainted with. We formulate the BP problem as a non-linear binary programming problem and prove its NP-hardness. To solve it in polynomial time, BigMovie relaxes the hard binary constraints and addresses the BP problem as a cubic programming problem. This paper is the short version, and you can move to the full version of the paper to get more information.

In many real-world applications, data are often unlabeled and comprised of different representations/views which often provide information complementary to each other. Although several multi-view clustering methods have been proposed, most of them routinely assume one weight for one view of features, and thus inter-view correlations are only considered at the view-level. These approaches, however, fail to explore the explicit correlations between features across multiple views. In this paper, we introduce a tensor-based approach to incorporate the higher-order interactions among multiple views as a tensor structure. Specifically, we propose a multi-linear multi-view clustering (MMC) method that can efficiently explore the full-order structural information among all views and reveal the underlying subspace structure embedded within the tensor. Extensive experiments on realworld datasets demonstrate that our proposed MMC algorithm clearly outperforms other related state-of-the-art methods.

Driving is a complex activity that requires multi-level skilled operations (e.g., acceleration, braking, turning). Analyzing driving behavior can help us assess driver performances, improve traffic safety, and, ultimately, promote the development of intelligent and resilient transportation systems. While some efforts have been made for analyzing driving behavior, existing methods can be improved via representation learning by jointly exploring the peer and temporal dependencies of driving behavior. To that end, in this paper, we develop a Peer and Temporal-Aware Representation Learning based framework (PTARL) for driving behavior analysis with GPS trajectory data. Specifically, we first detect the driving operations and states of each driver from GPS traces. Then, we derive a sequence of multi-view driving state transition graphs from the driving state sequences, in order to characterize a driver's driving behavior that varies over time. In addition, we develop a peer and temporal-aware representation learning method to learn a sequence of time-varying yet relational vectorized representations from the driving state transition graphs. The proposed method can simultaneously model both the graph-graph peer dependency and the current-past temporal dependency in a unified optimization framework. Also, we provide effective solutions for the optimization problem. Moreover, we exploit the learned representations of driving behavior to score driving performances and detect dangerous regions. Finally, extensive experimental results with big trajectory data demonstrate the enhanced performance of the proposed method for driving behavior analysis.

Multimedia data available in various disciplines are usually heterogeneous, containing representations in multi-views, where the cross-modal search techniques become necessary and useful. It is a challenging problem due to the heterogeneity of data with multiple modalities, multi-views in each modality and the diverse data categories. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-view cross-modal hashing method named Multi-view Collective Tensor Decomposition (MCTD) to fuse these data effectively, which can exploit the complementary feature extracted from multi-modality multi-view while simultaneously discovering multiple separated subspaces by leveraging the data categories as supervision information. Our contributions are summarized as follows: 1) we exploit tensor modeling to get better representation of the complementary features and redefine a latent representation space; 2) a block-diagonal loss is proposed to explicitly pursue a more discriminative latent tensor space by exploring supervision information; 3) we propose a new feature projection method to characterize the data and to generate the latent representation for incoming new queries. An optimization algorithm is proposed to solve the objective function designed for MCTD, which works under an iterative updating procedure. Experimental results prove the state-of-the-art precision of MCTD compared with competing methods.

Despite the popularity of Collaborative Filtering (CF), CF-based methods are haunted by the cold-start problem, which has a significantly negative impact on users' experiences with Recommender Systems (RS). In this paper, to overcome the aforementioned drawback, we first formulate the relationships between users and items as a bipartite graph. Then, we propose a new spectral convolution operation directly performing in the spectral domain, where not only the proximity information of a graph but also the connectivity information hidden in the graph are revealed. With the proposed spectral convolution operation, we build a deep recommendation model called Spectral Collaborative Filtering (SpectralCF). Benefiting from the rich information of connectivity existing in the spectral domain, SpectralCF is capable of discovering deep connections between users and items and therefore, alleviates the cold-start problem for CF. To the best of our knowledge, SpectralCF is the first CF-based method directly learning from the spectral domains of user-item bipartite graphs. We apply our method on several standard datasets. It is shown that SpectralCF significantly out-performs state-of-the-art models. Code and data are available at https://github.com/lzheng21/SpectralCF.

Bike-Sharing Systems (BSSs) are being introduced to more and more cities recently, and therefore they have generated huge amounts of data. Mobike is a station-less BSS which is suffering from the chaotic parking problem. To solve this problem, it is necessary to predict where the bikes are going. Traditional works dealing with destination prediction mainly focus on station-based BSSs, and they merely leverages context-aware information technically. Thus it is naturally promising to investigate how to improve the destination prediction of station-less bikes by context information. To that end, in this paper, we develop a multi-view machine (MVM) method, by incorporating the context information from Point of Interest (POI) data and human mobility data into destination prediction. Specifically, we first describe three different views, namely start position, start time and destination by features extracted from POI data and human mobility data. Then, we capture the relationship between these three views' interactions and the trip's possibility by a multi-view machine. Finally, since multi-view machine contains too many parameters to be optimized, we leverage tensor factorization (TF) to reduce the computation costs. The experimental results show that the model can effectively capture the potential relationship of three views with trip's possibility and the approach is thus much more effective than traditional prediction methods for destination.

Vibrant residential communities are defined as places with permeability, vitality, variety, accessibility, identity and legibility. Developing vibrant communities can help boost commercial activities, enhance public security, foster social interaction, and thus yield livable, sustainable, and viable environments. However, it is challenging to understand the underlying drivers of vibrant communities to make them traceable and predictable. Toward this goal, we study the problem of ranking vibrant communities using human mobility data and point-of-interests (POIs) data. We analyze large-scale urban and mobile data related to residential communities and find that in order to effectively identify vibrant communities, we should not just consider community “contents” such as buildings, facilities, and transportation, but also take into account the spatial structure. The spatial structure of a community refers to how the geographical items (POIs, road networks, public transits, etc.) of a community are spatially arranged and interact with one another. Along this line, we first develop a geographical learning method to find proper representations of communities. In addition, we propose a novel geographic ensemble ranking strategy, which aggregates a variety of weak rankers to effectively spot vibrant communities. Finally, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation with real-world residential community data. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Learning urban community structures refers to the efforts of quantifying, summarizing, and representing an urban community’s (i) static structures, e.g., Point-Of-Interests (POIs) buildings and corresponding geographic allocations, and (ii) dynamic structures, e.g., human mobility patterns among POIs. By learning the community structures, we can better quantitatively represent urban communities and understand their evolutions in the development of cities. This can help us boost commercial activities, enhance public security, foster social interactions, and, ultimately, yield livable, sustainable, and viable environments. However, due to the complex nature of urban systems, it is traditionally challenging to learn the structures of urban communities. To address this problem, in this article, we propose a collective embedding framework to learn the community structure from multiple periodic spatial-temporal graphs of human mobility. Specifically, we first exploit a probabilistic propagation-based approach to create a set of mobility graphs from periodic human mobility records. In these mobility graphs, the static POIs are regarded as vertexes, the dynamic mobility connectivities between POI pairs are regarded as edges, and the edge weights periodically evolve over time. A collective deep auto-encoder method is then developed to collaboratively learn the embeddings of POIs from multiple spatial-temporal mobility graphs. In addition, we develop a Unsupervised Graph based Weighted Aggregation method to align and aggregate the POI embeddings into the representation of the community structures. We apply the proposed embedding framework to two applications (i.e., spotting vibrant communities and predicting housing price return rates) to evaluate the performance of our proposed method. Extensive experimental results on real-world urban communities and human mobility data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed collective embedding framework.

In large-scale learning problem, the scalability of learning algorithms is usually the key factor affecting the algorithm practical performance, which is determined by both the time complexity of the learning algorithms and the amount of supervision information (i.e., labeled data). Learning with label proportions (LLP) is a new kind of machine learning problem which has drawn much attention in recent years. Different from the well-known supervised learning, LLP can estimate a classifier from groups of weakly labeled data, where only the positive/negative class proportions of each group are known. Due to its weak requirements for the input data, LLP presents a variety of real-world applications in almost all the fields involving anonymous data, like computer vision, fraud detection and spam filtering. However, even through the required labeled data is of a very small amount, LLP still suffers from the long execution time a lot due to the high time complexity of the learning algorithm itself. In this paper, we propose a very fast learning method based on inversing output scaling process and extreme learning machine, namely Inverse Extreme Learning Machine (IELM), to address the above issues. IELM can speed up the training process by order of magnitudes for large datasets, while achieving highly competitive classification accuracy with the existing methods at the same time. Extensive experiments demonstrate the significant speedup of the proposed method. We also demonstrate the feasibility of IELM with a case study in real-world setting: modeling image attributes based on ImageNet Object Attributes dataset.

A recent report indicates that there is a new malicious app introduced every 4 seconds. This rapid malware distribution rate causes existing malware detection systems to fall far behind, allowing malicious apps to escape vetting efforts and be distributed by even legitimate app stores. When trusted downloading sites distribute malware, several negative consequences ensue. First, the popularity of these sites would allow such malicious apps to quickly and widely infect devices. Second, analysts and researchers who rely on machine learning based detection techniques may also download these apps and mistakenly label them as benign since they have not been disclosed as malware. These apps are then used as part of their benign dataset during model training and testing. The presence of contaminants in benign dataset can compromise the effectiveness and accuracy of their detection and classification techniques. To address this issue, we introduce PUDROID (Positive and Unlabeled learning-based malware detection for Android) to automatically and effectively remove contaminants from training datasets, allowing machine learning based malware classifiers and detectors to be more effective and accurate. To further improve the performance of such detectors, we apply a feature selection strategy to select pertinent features from a variety of features. We then compare the detection rates and accuracy of detection systems using two datasets; one using PUDROID to remove contaminants and the other without removing contaminants. The results indicate that once we remove contaminants from the datasets, we can significantly improve both malware detection rate and detection accuracy.

Employees in companies can be divided into different social communities, and those who frequently socialize with each other will be treated as close friends and are grouped in the same community. In the enterprise context, a large amount of information about the employees is available in both (1) offline company internal sources and (2) online enterprise social networks (ESNs). Each of the information sources also contain multiple categories of employees' socialization activities at the same time. In this paper, we propose to detect the social communities of the employees in companies based on the broad learning setting with both these online and offline information sources simultaneously, and the problem is formally called the "Broad Learning based Enterprise Community Detection" (BL-ECD) problem. To address the problem, a novel broad learning based community detection framework named "HeterogeneoUs Multi-sOurce ClusteRing" (HUMOR) is introduced in this paper. Based on the various enterprise social intimacy measures introduced in this paper, HUMOR detects a set of micro community structures of the employees based on each of the socialization activities respectively. To obtain the (globally) consistent community structure of employees in the company, HUMOR further fuses these micro community structures via two broad learning phases: (1) intra-fusion of micro community structures to obtain the online and offline (locally) consistent communities respectively, and (2) inter-fusion of the online and offline communities to achieve the (globally) consistent community structure of employees. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world enterprise datasets demonstrate our method can perform very well in addressing the BL-ECD problem.

Anchor links connect information entities, such as entities of movies or products, across networks from different sources, and thus information in these networks can be transferred directly via anchor links. Therefore, anchor links have great value to many cross-network applications, such as cross-network social link prediction and cross-network recommendation. In this paper, we focus on studying the recommendation problem that can provide ratings of items or services. To address the problem, we propose a Cross-network Collaborative Matrix Factorization (CCMF) recommendation framework based on broad learning setting, which can effectively integrate multi-source information and alleviate the sparse information problem in each individual network. Based on item anchor links CCMF can fuse item similarity information and item latent information across networks from different sources. And different from most of the traditional works, CCMF can make multi-source recommendation tasks collaborate together via the information transfer based on the broad learning setting. During the transfer process, a novel cross-network similarity transfer method is applied to keep the consistency of item similarities between two different networks, and a domain adaptation matrix is used to overcome the domain difference problem. We conduct experiments to compare the proposed CCMF method with both classic and state-of-the-art recommendation techniques. The experimental results illustrate that CCMF outperforms other methods in different experimental circumstances, and has great advantages on dealing with different data sparse problems.

Users' addiction to online social networks is discovered to be highly correlated with their social connections in the networks. Dense social connections can effectively help online social networks retain their active users and improve the social network services. Therefore, it is of great importance to make a good prediction of the social links among users. Meanwhile, to enjoy more social network services, users nowadays are usually involved in multiple online social networks simultaneously. Formally, the social networks which share a number of common users are defined as the "aligned networks". With the information transferred from multiple aligned social networks, we can gain a more comprehensive knowledge about the social preferences of users in the pre-specified target network, which will benefit the social link prediction task greatly. However, when transferring the knowledge from other aligned source networks to the target network, there usually exists a shift in information distribution between different networks, namely domain difference. In this paper, we study the social link prediction problem of the target network, which is aligned with multiple social networks concurrently. To accommodate the domain difference issue, we project the features extracted for links from different aligned networks into a shared lower-dimensional feature space. Moreover, users in social networks usually tend to form communities and would only connect to a small number of users. Thus, the target network structure has both the low-rank and sparse properties. We propose a novel optimization framework, SLAMPRED, to combine both these two properties aforementioned of the target network and the information of multiple aligned networks with nice domain adaptations. Since the objective function is a linear combination of convex and concave functions involving nondifferentiable regularizers, we propose a novel optimization method to iteratively solve it. Extensive experiments have been done on real-world aligned social networks, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.

Employees in companies can be divided into different social communities, and those who frequently socialize with each other are treated as close friends and will be grouped in the same community. In the enterprise context, a large amount of information about the employees is available in both (1) offline company internal sources and (2) online enterprise social networks (ESNs). What's more, each of the information sources can also contain multiple categories of employees' socialization activity information at the same time. In this paper, we propose to detect the social communities of the employees in companies based on these different information sources simultaneously, and the problem is formally called the "Enterprise Community Detection" (ECD) problem. To address the problem, a novel community detection framework named "HeterogeneoUs MultisOurce ClusteRing" (HUMOR) is introduced in this paper. Based on the various enterprise social intimacy measures introduced in this paper, HUMOR detects a set of micro community structures of the employees based on these different categories of information available in the online and offline sources respectively. (A full version of this paper is available in [5]).

Network embedding aims at projecting the network data into a low-dimensional feature space, where the nodes are represented as a unique feature vector and network structure can be effectively preserved. In recent years, more and more online application service sites can be represented as massive and complex networks, which are extremely challenging for traditional machine learning algorithms to deal with. Effective embedding of the complex network data into low-dimension feature representation can both save data storage space and enable traditional machine learning algorithms applicable to handle the network data. Network embedding performance will degrade greatly if the networks are of a sparse structure, like the emerging networks with few connections. In this paper, we propose to learn the embedding representation for a target emerging network based on the broad learning setting, where the emerging network is aligned with other external mature networks at the same time. To solve the problem, a new embedding framework, namely "Deep alIgned autoencoder based eMbEdding" (DIME), is introduced in this paper. DIME handles the diverse link and attribute in a unified analytic based on broad learning, and introduces the multiple aligned attributed heterogeneous social network concept to model the network structure. A set of meta paths are introduced in the paper, which define various kinds of connections among users via the heterogeneous link and attribute information. The closeness among users in the networks are defined as the meta proximity scores, which will be fed into DIME to learn the embedding vectors of users in the emerging network. Extensive experiments have been done on real-world aligned social networks, which have demonstrated the effectiveness of DIME in learning the emerging network embedding vectors.

Inferring the links among entities in networks is an important research problem for various disciplines. Depending on the specific application settings, the links to be inferred are usually subject to different cardinality constraints, like one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many. However, most existing research works on link prediction problems fail to consider such a kind of constraint. In this paper, we propose to study the link prediction problem with general cardinality constraints, which is formally defined as the CLP (Cardinality Constrained Link Prediction) problem. By minimizing the projection loss of links from feature vectors to labels, the CLP problem is formulated as an optimization problem involving multiple variables, where the cardinality constraints are modeled as mathematical constraints on node degrees. The objective function is shown to be not jointly convex and the optimal solution subject to the cardinality constraints can be very time-consuming to achieve. To solve the optimization problem, an iterative variable updating based link prediction framework ITERCLIPS (Iterative Constrained Link Prediction & Selection) is introduced in this paper, which involves the steps on link updating and selection alternatively. To overcome the high time cost problem, a greedy link selection step is introduced in this paper, which picks links greedily while preserving the link cardinality constraints simultaneously. Meanwhile, to ensure the effectiveness of ITERCLIPS on large-scale networks, a distributed implementation of ITERCLIPS is further presented as a scalable solution to the CLP problem. Extensive experiments have been done on three real-world network datasets with different types of cardinality constraints, and the experimental results achieved by ITERCLIPS on all these datasets can demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of ITERCLIPS in solving the CLP problem.

Professional career training for novice employees at elementary levels to help them master necessary working skills is critical for both achieving employees' professional success and enhancing the enterprise growth. Besides adopting professional services from external career training agencies, companies can actually train the employees more effectively by involving them in various internal projects carried out in the companies. In this paper, we will study the "Employee Training" (ET) problem by assigning the employees to various concrete company internal projects. From the company perspective, besides training the employees, another important objective of carrying out these projects is to finish them successfully. The successful accomplishment of projects depends on various issues, like the skill qualification of the built teams and the effective collaboration among the team members. To achieve these two objectives simultaneously, a novel framework named "Team foRmAtion based employee traINing" (TRAIN) is proposed in this paper. TRAIN formulates the ET problem as a joint optimization problem, where the objective function considers the employees' overall skill gain and the team internal communication costs at the same time. To ensure the success of the projects, a new team skill qualification constraint is proposed and added to the optimization problem. Extensive experiments conducted on the real-world enterprise employee project team dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of TRAIN in addressing the problem.

Most real systems consist of a large number of interacting, multi-typed components, while most contemporary researches model them as homogeneous information networks, without distinguishing different types of objects and links in the networks. Recently, more and more researchers begin to consider these interconnected, multi-typed data as heterogeneous information networks, and develop structural analysis approaches by leveraging the rich semantic meaning of structural types of objects and links in the networks. Compared to widely studied homogeneous information network, the heterogeneous information network contains richer structure and semantic information, which provides plenty of opportunities as well as a lot of challenges for data mining. In this paper, we provide a survey of heterogeneous information network analysis. We will introduce basic concepts of heterogeneous information network analysis, examine its developments on different data mining tasks, discuss some advanced topics, and point out some future research directions.

To incentivize users' participations, online social networks often provide users with various rewards for their contributions to the sites. Attracted by the rewards, users will spend more time using the network services. Specifically, in this paper, we will mainly focus on “badges reward systems”. Badges are small icons attached to users' homepages and profiles denoting their achievements. People like to accumulate badge for various reasons, which are modeled as the “badge values” in this paper. Meanwhile, to get badges, people also need to exert efforts to finish the required tasks, which will lead to certain “costs” as well. To understand users' badge achievement activities better, we will study an existing badge system launched in a real-world online social network, Foursquare, in this paper. A longer version of this paper is available at [14].

Traditional viral marketing problems aim at selecting a subset of seed users for one single product to maximize its awareness in social networks. However, in real scenarios, multiple products can be promoted in social networks at the same time. At the product level, the relationships among these products can be quite intertwined, e.g., competing, complementary and independent. In this paper, we will study the “interTwined Influence Maximization” (i.e., TIM) problem for one product that we target on in online social networks, where multiple other competing/complementary/independent products are being promoted simultaneously. The TIM problem is very challenging to solve due to (1) few existing models can handle the intertwined diffusion procedure of multiple products concurrently, and (2) optimal seed user selection for the target product may depend on other products' marketing strategies a lot. To address the TIM problem, a unified greedy framework TIER (interTwined Influence EstimatoR) is proposed in this paper. Extensive experiments conducted on four different types of real-world social networks demonstrate that TIER can outperform all the comparison methods with significant advantages in solving the TIM problem.

Privacy preservation in location-based proximity services has recently received considerable attention in geo-social networks. Nearby friends notification and social discoveries are two important types of location-based proximity services. A large number of privacy protection methods have been proposed on nearby friends notification, but few on social discoveries. Most of existing protection methods on nearby friends notification cannot be applied in social discoveries, since a secret key needs to be shared between dynamic friends. In this paper, we address the research challenges that the location privacy protection in distance-based social discoveries. We propose a novel framework DistSD for the distance-based social discovery with personalized posterior screening. We also show that the problem that finding an optimal safe group of nearby seeking users is NP-hard. Two heuristic privacy enhanced social discovery algorithms are proposed, which protect users' locations from a service result perspective. Experiments are conducted based on the real-life data and experimental results validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithms.

People nowadays need to spend a large amount of time on their work everyday and workplace has become an important social occasion for effective communication and information exchange among employees. Besides traditional online contacts (e.g., face-to-face meetings and telephone calls), to facilitate the communication and cooperation among employees, a new type of online social networks has been launched inside the firewalls of many companies, which are named as the "enterprise social networks" (ESNs). In this paper, we want to study the information diffusion among employees at workplace via both online ESNs and online contacts. This is formally defined as the IDE (Information Diffusion in Enterprise) problem. Several challenges need to be addressed in solving the IDE problem: (1) diffusion channel extraction from online ESN and online contacts; (2) effective aggregation of the information delivered via different diffusion channels; and (3) communication channel weighting and selection. A novel information diffusion model, Muse (Multi-source Multi-channel Multi-topic diffUsion SElection), is introduced in this paper to resolve these challenges. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world ESN and organizational chart dataset demonstrate the outstanding performance of Muse in addressing the IDE problem.

Bicycle-sharing systems (BSSs) which provide short-term shared bike usage services for the public are becoming very popular in many large cities. The accelerating bike traveling demands from the public have driven several significant expansions of many BSSs to place additional bikes and stations in their extended service regions. Meanwhile, to capture individuals' traveling needs more precisely, in the expansion, many BSSs have set up online websites to receive station location suggestions from the public. In this paper, we will study the bike station re-deployment problem in the BSSs expansion. Besides the historical bike usage and construction cost information, the crowd suggestions are also incorporated in the problem. The station re-deployment problem is very challenging to solve, and it covers two sub-tasks simultaneously: (1) bike station locations identification, and (2) bike dock assignment (to the deployed stations). To address the problem, a novel bike station re-deployment framework, CrowdPlanning, is introduced in this paper. In both station deployment and capacity assignment tasks, CrowdPlanning fuses different categories of spatial information including the crowd suggestions, individuals' historical bike usage and the construction costs simultaneously. By formulating these two tasks as two optimization problems, the optimal expansion strategies can be identified by CrowdPlanning. for the BSSs. Extensive experiments are conducted on the real-world BSSs and crowd suggestion dataset to demonstrate the effectiveness of framework CrowdPlanning.

Bicycle-sharing systems, which can provide shared bike usage services for the public, have been launched in many big cities. In bicycle-sharing systems, people can borrow and return bikes at any stations in the service region very conveniently. Therefore, bicycle-sharing systems are normally used as a short distance trip supplement for private vehicles as well as regular public transportation. Meanwhile, for stations located at different places in the service region, the bike usages can be quite skewed and imbalanced. Some stations have too many incoming bikes and get jammed without enough docks for upcoming bikes, while some other stations get empty quickly and lack enough bikes for people to check out. Therefore, inferring the potential destinations and arriving time of each individual trip beforehand can effectively help the service providers schedule manual bike re-dispatch in advance. In this paper, we will study the individual trip prediction problem for bicycle-sharing systems. To address the problem, we study a real-world bicycle-sharing system and analyze individuals' bike usage behaviors first. Based on the analysis results, a new trip destination prediction and trip duration inference model will be introduced. Experiments conducted on a real-world bicycle-sharing system demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.

Nowadays, a modern e-commerce company may have both online sales and offline sales departments. Normally, online sales attempt to sell in small quantities to individual customers through broadcasting a large amount of emails or promotion codes, which heavily rely on the designed backend algorithms. Offline sales, on the other hand, try to sell in much larger quantities to enterprise customers through contacts initiated by sales representatives, which are more costly compared to online sales. Unlike many previous research works focusing on machine learning algorithms to support online sales, this paper introduces an approach that utilizes heterogenous social networks to improve the effectiveness of offline sales. More specifically, we propose a two-phase framework, HeteroSales, which first constructs a company-to-company graph, a.k.a. Company Homophily Graph (CHG), from semantics based meta-path learning, and then adopts label propagation on the graph to predict promising companies that we may successfully close an offline deal with. Based on the statistical analysis on the world's largest professional social network, LinkedIn, we demonstrate interesting discoveries showing that not all the social connections in a heterogeneous social network are useful in this task. In other words, some proper data preprocessing is essential to ensure the effectiveness of offline sales. Finally, through the experiments on LinkedIn social network data and third-party offline sales records, we demonstrate the power of HereroSales to identify potential enterprise customers in offline sales.

People nowadays usually participate in multiple online social networks simultaneously to enjoy more social network services. Besides the common users, social networks providing similar services can also share many other kinds of information entities, e.g., locations, videos and products. However, these shared information entities in different networks are mostly isolated without any known corresponding connections. In this paper, we aim at inferring such potential corresponding connections linking multiple kinds of shared entities across networks simultaneously. Formally, the problem is referred to as the network "Partial Co-alignmenT" (PCT) problem. PCT is an important problem and can be the prerequisite for many concrete cross-network applications, like social network fusion, mutual information exchange and transfer. Meanwhile, the PCT problem is also very challenging to address due to various reasons, like (1) the heterogeneity of social networks, (2) lack of training instances to build models, and (3) one-to-one constraint on the correspondence connections. To resolve these challenges, a novel unsupervised network alignment framework, UNICOAT (UNsupervIsed COncurrent AlignmenT)), is introduced in this paper. Based on the heterogeneous information, UNICOAT transforms the PCT problem into a joint optimization problem. To solve the objective function, the one-to-one constraint on the corresponding relationships is relaxed, and the redundant non-existing corresponding connections introduced by such a relaxation will be pruned with a novel network co-matching algorithm proposed in this paper. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world co-aligned social network datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of UNICOAT in addressing the PCT problem.

Many companies have started to use Enterprise Social Networks (ESNs), such as Yammer, to facilitate collaboration and communication amongst their employees in the business context. Social link recommendation, which finds and suggests whom one wants to connect with in a company, is crucial for ESNs to promote their usages. Although link recommendation has been studied extensively in external social networks (e.g., Facebook and Twitter), it has not been addressed in ESNs. In this paper, we study this novel problem. Social link recommendation in ESNs is significantly different from that in external social networks, and also has unique challenges: (1) people usually socialize differently in enterprise than in their personal life, but users' social behaviors in enterprise have not been well explored, and (2) there is important business information available in ESNs under the enterprise context, e.g., a company?s organizational chart, but how to exploit it for link recommendation is still an open problem. To this end, we mine not only the social graph and user-generated content in ESNs, but also the company's organizational chart, to model enterprise user social behaviors. We develop a supervised link recommendation algorithm using a large scale enterprise social network based on Yammer (with over 100k users), which shows that the proposed techniques perform effectively. Moreover, we find that both the social graph and the organizational chart are complementary to each other for link recommendation in ESNs.

Users nowadays are normally involved in multiple (usually more than two) online social networks simultaneously to enjoy more social network services. Some of the networks that users are involved in can share common structures either due to the analogous network construction purposes or because of the similar social network features. However, the social network datasets available in research are usually pre-anonymized and accounts of the shared users in different networks are mostly isolated without any known connections. In this paper, we want to identify such connections between the shared users' accounts in multiple social networks (i.e., the anchor links), which is formally defined as the M-NASA (Multiple Anonymized Social Networks Alignment) problem. M-NASA is very challenging to address due to (1) the lack of known anchor links to build models, (2) the studied networks are anonymized, where no users' personal profile or attribute information is available, and (3) the "transitivity law" and the "one-to-one property" based constraints on anchor links. To resolve these challenges, a novel two-phase network alignment framework UMA (Unsupervised Multi-network Alignment) is proposed in this paper. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple real-world partially aligned social networks demonstrate that UMA can perform very well in solving the M-NASA problem.

Nowadays, to facilitate the communication and cooperation among employees, a new family of online social networks has been adopted in many companies, which are called the "enterprise social networks" (ESNs). ESNs can provide employees with various professional services to help them deal with daily work issues. Meanwhile, employees in companies are usually organized into different hierarchies according to the relative ranks of their positions. The company internal management structure can be outlined with the organizational chart visually, which is normally confidential to the public out of the privacy and security concerns. In this paper, we want to study the IOC (Inference of Organizational Chart) problem to identify company internal organizational chart based on the heterogeneous online ESN launched in it. IOC is very challenging to address as, to guarantee smooth operations, the internal organizational charts of companies need to meet certain structural requirements (about its depth and width). To solve the IOC problem, a novel unsupervised method Create (ChArT REcovEr) is proposed in this paper, which consists of 3 steps: (1) social stratification of ESN users into different social classes, (2) supervision link inference from managers to subordinates, and (3) consecutive social classes matching to prune the redundant supervision links. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world online ESN dataset demonstrate that Create can perform very well in addressing the IOC problem.

Nowadays, many new social networks offering specific services spring up overnight. In this paper, we want to detect communities for emerging networks. Community detection for emerging networks is very challenging as information in emerging networks is usually too sparse for traditional methods to calculate effective closeness scores among users and achieve good community detection results. Meanwhile, users nowadays usually join multiple social networks simultaneously, some of which are developed and can share common information with the emerging networks. Based on both link and attribution information across multiple networks, a new general closeness measure, intimacy, is introduced in this paper. With both micro and macro controls, an effective and efficient method, CAD (Cold stArt community Detector), is proposed to propagate information from developed network to calculate effective intimacy scores among users in emerging networks. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world social networks demonstrate that CAD can perform very well in addressing the emerging network community detection problem.

Social networks have been part of people's daily life and plenty of users have registered accounts in multiple social networks. Interconnections among multiple social networks add a multiplier effect to social applications when fully used. With the sharp expansion of network size, traditional standalone algorithms can no longer support computing on large scale networks while alternatively, distributed and parallel computing become a solution to utilize the data-intensive information hidden in multiple social networks. As such, synergistic partitioning, which takes the relationships among different networks into consideration and focuses on partitioning the same nodes of different networks into same partitions. With that, the partitions containing the same nodes can be assigned to the same server to improve the data locality and reduce communication overhead among servers, which are very important for distributed applications. To date, there have been limited studies on multiple large scale network partitioning due to three major challenges: 1) the need to consider relationships across multiple networks given the existence of intricate interactions, 2) the difficulty for standalone programs to utilize traditional partitioning methods, 3) the fact that to generate balanced partitions is NP-complete. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to partition multiple social networks synergistically. In particular, we apply a distributed multilevel k-way partitioning method to divide the first network into k partitions. Based on the given anchor nodes which exist in all the social networks and the partition results of the first network, using MapReduce, we then develop a modified distributed multilevel partitioning method to divide other networks. Extensive experiments on two real data sets demonstrate that our method can significantly outperform baseline independent-partitioning method in accuracy and scalability.

Online social networks offering various services have become ubiquitous in our daily life. Meanwhile, users nowadays are usually involved in multiple online social networks simultaneously to enjoy specific services provided by different networks. Formally, social networks that share some common users are named as partially aligned networks. In this paper, we want to predict the formation of social links in multiple partially aligned social networks at the same time, which is formally defined as the multi-network link (formation) prediction problem. In multiple partially aligned social networks, users can be extensively correlated with each other by various connections. To categorize these diverse connections among users, 7 "intra-network social meta paths" and 4 categories of "inter-network social meta paths" are proposed in this paper. These "social meta paths" can cover a wide variety of connection information in the network, some of which can be helpful for solving the multi-network link prediction problem but some can be not. To utilize useful connection, a subset of the most informative "social meta paths" are picked, the process of which is formally defined as "social meta path selection" in this paper. An effective general link formation prediction framework, Mli (Multi-network Link Identifier), is proposed in this paper to solve the multi-network link (formation) prediction problem. Built with heterogenous topological features extracted based on the selected "social meta paths" in the multiple partially aligned social networks, Mli can help refine and disambiguate the prediction results reciprocally in all aligned networks. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world partially aligned heterogeneous networks, Foursquare and Twitter, demonstrate that Mli can solve the multi-network link prediction problem very well.

ocation-based social networks (LBSNs) are one kind of online social networks offering geographic services and have been attracting much attention in recent years. LBSNs usually have complex structures, involving heterogeneous nodes and links. Many recommendation services in LBSNs (e.g., friend and location recommendation) can be cast as link prediction problems (e.g., social link and location link prediction). Traditional link prediction researches on LBSNs mostly focus on predicting either social links or location links, assuming the prediction tasks of different types of links to be independent. However, in many real-world LBSNs, the prediction tasks for social links and location links are strongly correlated and mutually influential. Another key challenge in link prediction on LBSNs is the data sparsity problem (i.e., "new network" problem), which can be encountered when LBSNs branch into new geographic areas or social groups. Actually, nowadays, many users are involved in multiple networks simultaneously and users who just join one LBSN may have been using other LBSNs for a long time. In this paper, we study the problem of predicting multiple types of links simultaneously for a new LBSN across partially aligned LBSNs and propose a novel method TRAIL (TRAnsfer heterogeneous lInks across LBSNs). TRAIL can accumulate information for locations from online posts and extract heterogeneous features for both social links and location links. TRAIL can predict multiple types of links simultaneously. In addition, TRAIL can transfer information from other aligned networks to the new network to solve the problem of lacking information. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world aligned LBSNs show that TRAIL can achieve very good performance and substantially outperform the baseline methods.

Online social networks can often be represented as heterogeneous information networks containing abundant information about: who, where, when and what. Nowadays, people are usually involved in multiple social networks simultaneously. The multiple accounts of the same user in different networks are mostly isolated from each other without any connection between them. Discovering the correspondence of these accounts across multiple social networks is a crucial prerequisite for many interesting inter-network applications, such as link recommendation and community analysis using information from multiple networks. In this paper, we study the problem of anchor link prediction across multiple heterogeneous social networks, i.e., discovering the correspondence among different accounts of the same user. Unlike most prior work on link prediction and network alignment, we assume that the anchor links are one-to-one relationships (i.e., no two edges share a common endpoint) between the accounts in two social networks, and a small number of anchor links are known beforehand. We propose to extract heterogeneous features from multiple heterogeneous networks for anchor link prediction, including user's social, spatial, temporal and text information. Then we formulate the inference problem for anchor links as a stable matching problem between the two sets of user accounts in two different networks. An effective solution, MNA (Multi-Network Anchoring), is derived to infer anchor links w.r.t. the one-to-one constraint. Extensive experiments on two real-world heterogeneous social networks show that our MNA model consistently outperform other commonly-used baselines on anchor link prediction.

Nowadsys, many new users are keeping joining in the online social networks every day and these new users usually have very few social connections and very sparse auxiliary information in the network. Prediction social links for new users is very important. Different from conventional link prediction problems, link prediction for new users is more challenging due to the lack of information from the new users in the network. Meanwhile, in recent years, users are usually involved in multiple social networks simultaneously to enjoy the specific services offered by different social networks. The shared users of multiple networks can act as the "anchors" aligned the networks they participate in. In this paper, we propose a link prediction method called SCAN-PS (Supervised Cross Aligned Networks link prediction with Personalized Sampling), to solve the social link prediction problem for new users. SCAN-PS can use information transferred from both the existing active users in the target network and other source networks through aligned accounts. In addition, SCAN-PS could solve the cold start problem when information of these new users is total absent in the target network. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world aligned heterogeneous social networks demonstrate that SCAN-PS can perform well in predicting social links for new users.