Accurately capturing the spatial correlations of traffic network significantly benefits short-term traffic forecasting. Some existing works represent spatial correlations in a simple one-dimensional space, but they cannot represent the real spatial correlations among sensors comprehensively. The other existing works represent the spatial correlations through grid-based method, but the local correlation of constructed spatial map is too superficial to extract deep spatial features effectively. Therefore, a novel deep learning model is proposed, which aims to represent the spatial correlations more effectively through a new correlation matrix structure. In the proposed model, the correlations among sensors are calculated from multiple perspectives to construct the speed, volume, and occupancy correlation matrices respectively. Then, considering that highly correlated sensors are close in the spatial dimension, an enhanced heuristic optimization algorithm is proposed to evolve these three correlation matrices into optimal ones by reorganizing the highly correlated sensors into each others neighborhood. Finally, the three optimal correlation matrices are combined to form a three-dimensional multivariate correlation matrix characterized by locally high correlation, which is beneficial to exploit the deep spatial features of traffic network. The experiments show that the proposed model has better accuracy and stability than other commonly used baseline models.

Real-time/online activity recognition (AR) is an important technology in smart Internet of Things (IoT) systems where users are assisted by smart devices in their daily activities. How to generate appropriate feature representation from sensor event streaming is a challenging issue for accurate and efficient real-time AR. Previous AR models that rely on explicit domain knowledge are not appropriate for online recognition of complex human activities. We propose to use unsupervised learning to learn about the latent knowledge and embed the activity probability distribution prediction as high-level features to boost real-time AR performance. The proposed approach first learns the latent knowledge from explicit-activity window sequences using unsupervised learning, and derives the probability distribution prediction of activity classes for a given sliding window. Our approach then feeds the prediction with other basic features of the sliding window into a classifier to produce the final class result on each event-count sliding window. Experiments on five smart home datasets show that the proposed method achieves a higher accuracy by at least 20 percent improvement on F1_score than previous traditional algorithms, while maintaining a lower time cost than deep learning based methods. An analysis on the feature importance shows that the addition of probability distribution prediction about activity classes leads to a promising direction for real-time AR.

Social recommender system, using social relation networks as additional input to improve the accuracy of traditional recommender systems, has become an important research topic. However, most existing methods utilize the entire user relationship network with no consideration to its huge size, sparsity, imbalance, and noise issues. This may degrade the efficiency and accuracy of social recommender systems. This study proposes a new approach to manage the complexity of adding social relation networks to recommender systems. Our method first generates an individual relationship network (IRN) for each user and item by developing a novel fitting algorithm of relationship networks to control the relationship propagation and contracting. We then fuse matrix factorization with social regularization and the neighborhood model using IRN's to generate recommendations. Our approach is quite general, and can also be applied to the item-item relationship network by switching the roles of users and items. Experiments on four datasets with different sizes, sparsity levels, and relationship types show that our approach can improve predictive accuracy and gain a better scalability compared with state-of-the-art social recommendation methods.