Zan Zhang 0002

dblp:123/0825-2 · DBLP profile ↗
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12ranked-venue papers in the field
6as first author
10since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0002-6383-1683ORCID · conflict

Domains — venue-derived; a paper can count in several

Data Mining & Knowledge Discovery · 6 (2 first)Database Systems & Data Management · 4 (2 first)Information Retrieval & Web Search · 1 (1 first)Knowledge Engineering, Semantic Web & Information Systems · 1 (1 first)
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 Partial multi-label learning via feature manifold learning
Zan Zhang 0002, Chengxuan Xu, Gong-Qing Wu
Inf. Sci.1
2026 Exploiting Global Information for Partial Multi-Label Learning
abstract
Partial Multi-Label Learning (PML) is an emerging weakly supervised learning framework, where each instance contains a candidate label set with only some labels being ground-truth labels. Many existing PML methods recover the information of the ground-truth label set through k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN) disambiguation. However, this popular strategy might be suboptimal, as it makes disambiguation for a given instance based solely on its neighbors' features and class labels, i.e., the local structural information in the feature space, thereby missing the opportunity to explicitly and sufficiently leverage the global structural information in the feature space to facilitate disambiguation. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm called PRAG, i.e., PaRtiAl multi-label learning by exploiting Global information, which incorporates the global factor obtained from the features of all the training instances into the kNN disambiguation process. Specifically, we learn for each instance a global factor vector, which captures the global affinity between an instance and each label across the feature space. This global factor vector is continuously updated through iterative propagation, with each iteration computing the global factor vector based on the similarity between the instance's features and a dynamically constructed label prototype for each label. The label prototype is formed by aggregating the features of all training instances weighted by their current estimated confidence for that label. Crucially, the global factor vector serves as a weighting mechanism during aggregation of the neighbor labels in the kNN disambiguation step. It effectively injects global structural information into the local disambiguation process, providing a more robust estimation of label confidence by mitigating the limitations of relying solely on potentially noisy local neighbors. Based on the estimated label confidence, PRAG then exploits label correlations to classify instances. We conducted extensive experiments on various real and synthetic datasets, and the results show the superiority of PRAG compared to the state-of-the-art methods.
Zan Zhang 0002, Yongpan Chang, Jialu Yao, Lin Liu 0003, Jiuyong Li, Xindong Wu 0001
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.1
2025 A Relation-Constraint Link Prediction Model for Dynamic Knowledge Graphs with Entity Drift
abstract
Knowledge Graphs (KGs) often suffer from incompleteness and this issue motivates the task of Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC). Traditional KGC models mainly concentrate on static KGs with a fixed set of entities and relations, or dynamic KGs with temporal characteristics, faltering in their generalization to constantly evolving KGs with possible irregular entity drift. Thus, in this paper, we propose a novel link prediction model based on the embedding representation to handle the incompleteness of KGs with entity drift, termed as DCEL. Unlike traditional link prediction, DCEL could generate precise embeddings for drifted entity without imposing any regular temporal characteristic. The drifted entity is added into the KG with its links to the existing entity predicted in an incremental fashion with no requirement to retrain the whole KG for computational efficiency. In terms of DCEL model, it fully takes advantages of unstructured textual description, and is composed of four modules, namely MRC (Machine Reading Comprehension), RCAA (Relation Constraint Attentive Aggregator), RSA (Relation Specific Alignment) and RCEO (Relation Constraint Embedding Optimization). Specifically, the MRC module is first employed to extract short texts from long and redundant descriptions. Then, RCAA is used to aggregate the embeddings of textual description of drifted entity and the pre-trained word embeddings learned from corpus to a single text-based entity embedding while shielding the impact of noise and irrelevant information. After that, RSA is applied to align the text-based entity embedding to graph-based space to obtain the corresponding graph-based entity embedding, and then the learned embeddings are fed into the gate structure to be optimized based on the RCEO to improve the accuracy of representation learning. Finally, the graph-based model TransE is used to perform link prediction for drifted entity. Extensive experiments conducted on benchmark datasets in terms of evaluation protocols of MRR and Hits@ \(k\) reveal the superiority of DCEL model compared to its SOTAs.
Xiulin Zheng, Pei-Pei Li 0001, Zan Zhang 0002, Jia Wu 0001, Xindong Wu 0001
ACM Trans. Knowl. Discov. Data3
2024 Partial Label Feature Selection: An Adaptive Approach
abstract
As an emerging weakly supervised learning framework, partial label learning aims to induce a multi-class classifier from ambiguous supervision information where each training example is associated with a set of candidate labels, among which only one is the true label. Traditional feature selection methods, either for single label and multiple label problems, are not applicable to partial label learning as the ambiguous information contained in the label space obfuscates the importance of features and misleads the selection process. This makes the selection of a proper feature subset from partial label examples particularly challenging, and therefore has rarely been investigated. In this paper, we propose a novel feature selection algorithm for partial label learning, named PLFS, which considers not only the relationships between features and labels, but also exploits the relationships between instances to select the most informative and important features to enhance the performance of partial label learning. PLFS constructs an adaptive weighted graph to exploit the similarity information among instances, differentiate the label space and weight the feature space, which leads to the selection of a proper feature subset. Extensive experiments over a broad range of benchmark data sets clearly validate the effectiveness of our proposed feature selection approach.
Zan Zhang 0002, Jialu Yao, Lin Liu 0003, Jiuyong Li, Lei Li 0002, Xindong Wu 0001
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.1
2024 Geometric-Contextual Mutual Infomax Path Aggregation for Relation Reasoning on Knowledge Graph
abstract
Relation reasoning inKnowledgeGraphCompletion (KGC) aims at predicting missing relations between entities. Recently, effective KGC methods have usually focused on exploring the path pattern between entities, such as reward-based path walking and path context mining, to complete target relations. However, these methods typically suffer from two challenges: 1) They have difficulty in handling the individual representation limitation of candidate paths when there are no paths that directly represent latent relations between entities; 2) They overlook the biases of path context induction, which leads to unreasonable information interfering with the model's reasoning. To manage these challenges, aGeometric-ContextualMutualInfomax (GCMI) path aggregator is proposed for relation reasoning. First, we design an attentive path aggregator with a shared Transformer encoder to capture the contexts from several candidate paths parallelly and integrate these contexts to sufficiently represent the latent relations of each entity pair for reasoning. Then, the GCMI modules are proposed to constrain the local and global biases of path context induction in the Transformer encoder and the path aggregator, respectively, by a straightforward geometric rule. Extensive experiments on 32 real-world relation reasoning tasks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms 8 state-of-the-art baselines in terms of AP and AUC.
Xingrui Zhuo, Gong-Qing Wu, Zan Zhang 0002, Xindong Wu 0001
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.3
2023 Semi-Supervised Event Extraction Incorporated With Topic Event Frame
abstract
Supervised Meta-event extraction suffers from two limitations: (1) The extracted meta-events only contain local semantic information and do not present the core content of the text; (2) model performance is easily degraded because of labeled samples with insufficient number and poor quality. To overcome these limitations, this study presents an approach called frame-incorporated semi-supervised topic event extraction (FISTEE), which aims to extract topic events containing global semantic information. Inspired by the frame-based knowledge representation, a topic event frame is developed to integrate multiple meta-events into a topic event. Combined with the tri-training algorithm, a strategy for selecting unlabeled samples is designed to expand the training sets, and labeling models based on conditional random field (CRF) are constructed to label meta-events. The experimental results show that the event extraction performance of FISTEE is better than supervised learning-based approaches. Furthermore, the extracted topic events can present the core content of the text.
Gong-Qing Wu, Zhuochun Miao, Shengjie Hu, Yinghuan Wang, Zan Zhang 0002, Xianyu Bao
J. Database Manag.5
2023 Three-way Preference Completion via Preference Graph
abstract
With the personal partial rankings from agents over a subset of alternatives, the goal of preference completion is to infer the agent’s personalized preference over all alternatives including those the agent has not yet handled from uncertain preference of third parties. By combining the partial rankings of the target agent and the partial rankings from third parties to settle some disagreement with three-way preference completion, which includes a general strategy, an optimal strategy, and a pessimistic strategy, it forms the weighted preference graph. Technically, to settle the disagreement and obtain the completed preference of the target agent in the weighted preference graph, maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) under Mallows is proposed and validated theoretically by removing edges with the minimum weight in the weighted preference graph. However, it is not easy to locate the edges with the minimum weight efficiently in a big graph. Hence, an optimal MLE algorithm and three greedy MLE algorithms are proposed to process the MLE. Furthermore, these proposed algorithms are experimentally validated and compared with each other by both the synthetic dataset and the Flixter dataset.
Lei Li 0002, Zan Zhang 0002, Huanhuan Chen 0001, Xindong Wu 0001
ACM Trans. Knowl. Discov. Data3
2023 Integrating Global and Local Feature Selection for Multi-Label Learning
abstract
Multi-label learning deals with the problem where an instance is associated with multiple labels simultaneously. Multi-label data is often of high dimensionality and has many noisy, irrelevant, and redundant features. As an important machine learning task, multi-label feature selection has received considerable attention in recent years due to its promising performance in dealing with high-dimensional multi-label data. Existing multi-label feature selection methods typically select the global features which are shared by all instances in a dataset. However, these multi-label feature selection methods may be suboptimal since they do not consider the specific characteristics of instances. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm that integrates Global and Local Feature Selection (GLFS) to exploit both the global features and a subset of discriminative features shared only locally by a subgroup of instances in a multi-label dataset. Specifically, GLFS employs linear regression and ℓ 2,1 -norm on the regression parameters to achieve simultaneous global and local feature selection. Moreover, the proposed algorithm has an effective mechanism for utilizing label correlations to improve the feature selection. Experiments on real-world multi-label datasets show the superiority of GLFS over the state-of-the-art multi-label feature selection methods.
Zan Zhang 0002, Lin Liu 0003, Jiuyong Li, Xindong Wu 0001
ACM Trans. Knowl. Discov. Data1
2023 Multi-Label Feature Selection Via Adaptive Label Correlation Estimation
abstract
In multi-label learning, each instance is associated with multiple labels simultaneously. Multi-label data often have noisy, irrelevant, and redundant features of high dimensionality. Multi-label feature selection has received considerable attention as an effective means for dealing with high-dimensional multi-label data. Many multi-label feature selection methods exploit label correlations to help select features. However, finding label correlations and selecting features in existing multi-label feature selection methods are often two separate processes, the existence of noises and outliers in training data makes the label correlations exploited from label space less reliable. Therefore, the learned label correlations may mislead the feature selection process and result in the selection of less informative features. This article proposes a novel algorithm named ROAD, i.e., multi-label featuRe selectiOn via ADaptive label correlation estimation. ROAD jointly performs adaptive label correlation exploration and feature selection with alternating optimization to obtain reliable estimation of label correlations, which can more effectively reveal the intrinsic manifold structure among labels and lead to the selection of a more proper feature subset. Comprehensive experiments on several frequently used datasets validate the superiority of ROAD against the state-of-the-art multi-label feature selection algorithms.
Zan Zhang 0002, Jialu Yao, Lin Liu 0003, Jiuyong Li, Gong-Qing Wu, Xindong Wu 0001
ACM Trans. Knowl. Discov. Data1
2022 Hypernode: Entity Fusion for Data Traceability and Link Prediction
abstract
In the era of big data, fragmented knowledge, multisource heterogeneity, and different representation forms of the same entities in various data sources have posed considerable challenges to entity fusion. How to effectively integrate multisource knowledge for the same entities has provoked vast amounts of attention and research from multiple disciplines. Most existing methods for entity fusion can be categorized into two classes: one is to establish an association between the same entities, and the other is to delete duplicate entities after knowledge fusion and create a new fusion entity. However, in these two classes of methods, the former does not achieve true knowledge fusion and semantic interoperability, while the latter may cause irreversible loss of original information. In this paper, we propose a novel entity fusion scheme: Hypernode. Hypernode fuses the same entity in different data sources into a new entity while retaining the original data. We verify the effectiveness of Hypernode on multiple models of link prediction experiments. Several practical application cases illustrate the applicability of Hypernode in data traceability, open domain knowledge fusion, and multi-modal knowledge graph fusion.
Bingbing Dong, Zan Zhang 0002, Yi Zhu 0006, Chenyang Bu, Xindong Wu 0001
ICDM2
2018 Which Type of Classifier to Use for Networked Data, Connectivity Based or Feature Based?
Zan Zhang 0002, Jiuyong Li, Hao Wang 0008, Lin Liu 0003, Jixue Liu
WISE (1)1
2013 Markov Blanket Feature Selection with Non-faithful Data Distributions
abstract
In faithful Bayesian networks, the Markov blanket of the class attribute is a unique and minimal feature subset for optimal feature selection. However, little attention has been paid to Markov blanket feature selection in a non-faithful environment which widely exists in the real world. To tackle this issue, in this paper, we deal with non-faithful data distributions and propose the concept of representative sets instead of Markov blankets. With a standard sparse group lasso for selection of features from the representative sets, we design an effective algorithm, SRS, for Markov blanket feature Selection via Representative Sets with non-faithful data distributions. Empirical studies demonstrate that SRS outperforms the state-of-the-art Markov blanket feature selectors and other well-established feature selection methods.
Kui Yu, Xindong Wu 0001, Zan Zhang 0002, Yang Mu, Hao Wang 0008, Wei Ding 0003
ICDM3