A typical assumption in supervised fault detection is that abundant historical data are available prior to model learning, where all types of faults have already been observed at least once. This assumption is likely to be violated in practical settings as new fault types can emerge over time. In this paper we study this often overlooked cold start learning problem in data-driven fault detection, where in the beginning only normal operation data are available and faulty operation data become available as the faults occur. We explored how to leverage strengths of unsupervised and supervised approaches to build a model capable of detecting faults even if none are still observed, and of improving over time, as new fault types are observed. The proposed framework was evaluated on the benchmark Tennessee Eastman Process data. The proposed fusion model performed better on both unseen and seen faults than the stand-alone unsupervised and supervised models.

Patents are critical for a company to protect its core technologies. Effective patent mining in massive patent databases can provide companies with valuable insights to develop strategies for IP management and marketing. In this paper, we study a novel patent mining problem of automatically discovering core patents (i.e., patents with high novelty and influence in a domain). We address the unique patent vocabulary usage problem, which is not considered in traditional word-based statistical methods, and propose a topic-based temporal mining approach to quantify a patent's novelty and influence. Comprehensive experimental results on real-world patent portfolios show the effectiveness of our method.

Patenting is one of the most important ways to protect company's core business concepts and proprietary technologies. Analyzing large volume of patent data can uncover the potential competitive or collaborative relations among companies in certain areas, which can provide valuable information to develop strategies for intellectual property (IP), R&D, and marketing. In this paper, we present a novel topic-driven patent analysis and mining system. Instead of merely searching over patent content, we focus on studying the heterogeneous patent network derived from the patent database, which is represented by several types of objects (companies, inventors, and technical content) jointly evolving over time. We design and implement a general topic-driven framework for analyzing and mining the heterogeneous patent network. Specifically, we propose a dynamic probabilistic model to characterize the topical evolution of these objects within the patent network. Based on this modeling framework, we derive several patent analytics tools that can be directly used for IP and R&D strategy planning, including a heterogeneous network co-ranking method, a topic-level competitor evolution analysis algorithm, and a method to summarize the search results. We evaluate the proposed methods on a real-world patent database. The experimental results show that the proposed techniques clearly outperform the corresponding baseline methods.

Though news readers can easily access a large number of news articles from the Internet, they can be overwhelmed by the quantity of information available, making it hard to get a concise, global picture of a news topic. In this paper we propose a novel method to address this problem. Given a set of articles for a given news topic, the proposed method models theme variation through time and identifies the breakpoints, which are time points when decisive changes occur. For each breakpoint, a brief summary is automatically constructed based on articles associated with the particular time point. Summaries are then ordered chronologically to form a timeline overview of the news topic. In this fashion, readers can easily track various news topics efficiently. We have conducted experiments on 15 popular topics in 2010. Empirical experiments show the effectiveness of our approach and its advantages over other approaches.