User churn is an important issue in online services that threatens the health and profitability of services. Most of the previous works on churn prediction convert the problem into a binary classification task where the users are labeled as churned and non-churned. More recently, some works have tried to convert the user churn prediction problem into the prediction of user return time. In this approach which is more realistic in real world online services, at each time-step the model predicts the user return time instead of predicting a churn label. However, the previous works in this category suffer from lack of generality and require high computational complexity. In this paper, we introduceChOracle, an oracle that predicts the user churn by modeling the user return times to service by utilizing a combination of Temporal Point Processes and Recurrent Neural Networks. Moreover, we incorporate latent variables into the proposed recurrent neural network to model the latent user loyalty to the system. We also develop an efficient approximate variational inference algorithm for learning parameters of the proposed RNN by using back propagation through time. Finally, we demonstrate the superior performance of ChOracle on a wide variety of real world datasets.

Poisson Factorization (PF) is the gold standard framework for recommendation systems with implicit feedback whose variants show state-of-the-art performance on real-world recommendation tasks. However, they do not explicitly take into account the temporal behavior of users which is essential to recommend the right item to the right user at the right time. In this paper, we introduce Recurrent Poisson Factorization (RPF) framework that generalizes the classical PF methods by utilizing a Poisson process for modeling the implicit feedback. RPF treats time as a natural constituent of the model, and takes important factors for recommendation into consideration to provide a rich family of time-sensitive factorization models. They include Hierarchical RPFthat captures the consumption heterogeneity among users and items, Dynamic RPF that handles dynamic user preferences and item specifications, Social RPF that models the social-aspect of product adoption, Item-Item RPFthat considers the inter-item correlations, and eXtended Item-Item RPF that utilizes items' metadata to better infer the correlation among engagement patterns of users with items. We also develop an efficient variational algorithm for approximate inference that scales up to massive datasets. We demonstrate RPF's superior performance over many state-of-the-art methods on synthetic dataset, and wide variety of large scale real-world datasets.

User modeling plays an important role in delivering customized web services to the users and improving their engagement. However, most user models in the literature do not explicitly consider the temporal behavior of users. More recently, continuous-time user modeling has gained considerable attention and many user behavior models have been proposed based on temporal point processes. However, typical point process-based models often considered the impact of peer influence and content on the user participation and neglected other factors. Gamification elements are among those factors that are neglected, while they have a strong impact on user participation in online services. In this article, we propose interdependent multi-dimensional temporal point processes that capture the impact of badges on user participation besides the peer influence and content factors. We extend the proposed processes to model user actions over the community-based question and answering websites, and propose an inference algorithm based on Variational-Expectation Maximization that can efficiently learn the model parameters. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real data gathered from Stack Overflow show that our inference algorithm learns the parameters efficiently and the proposed method can better predict the user behavior compared to the alternatives.

Poisson factorization is a probabilistic model of users and items for recommendation systems, where the so-called implicit consumer data is modeled by a factorized Poisson distribution. There are many variants of Poisson factorization methods who show state-of-the-art performance on real-world recommendation tasks. However, most of them do not explicitly take into account the temporal behavior and the recurrent activities of users which is essential to recommend the right item to the right user at the right time. In this paper, we introduce Recurrent Poisson Factorization (RPF) framework that generalizes the classical PF methods by utilizing a Poisson process for modeling the implicit feedback. RPF treats time as a natural constituent of the model and brings to the table a rich family of time-sensitive factorization models. To elaborate, we instantiate several variants of RPF who are capable of handling dynamic user preferences and item specification (DRPF), modeling the social-aspect of product adoption (SRPF), and capturing the consumption heterogeneity among users and items (HRPF). We also develop a variational algorithm for approximate posterior inference that scales up to massive data sets. Furthermore, we demonstrate RPF's superior performance over many state-of-the-art methods on synthetic dataset, and large scale real-world datasets on music streaming logs, and user-item interactions in M-Commerce platforms.

This paper introduces a novel framework for modeling temporal events with complex longitudinal dependency that are generated by dependent sources. This framework takes advantage of multidimensional point processes for modeling time of events. The intensity function of the proposed process is a mixture of intensities, and its complexity grows with the complexity of temporal patterns of data. Moreover, it utilizes a hierarchical dependent nonparametric approach to model marks of events. These capabilities allow the proposed model to adapt its temporal and topical complexity according to the complexity of data, which makes it a suitable candidate for real world scenarios. An online inference algorithm is also proposed that makes the framework applicable to a vast range of applications. The framework is applied to a real world application, modeling the diffusion of contents over networks. Extensive experiments reveal the effectiveness of the proposed framework in comparison with state-of-the-art methods.

This paper presents a structured dictionary-based model for hyperspectral data that incorporates both spectral and contextual characteristics of spectral samples. The idea is to partition the pixels of a hyperspectral image into a number of spatial neighborhoods called contextual groups and to model the pixels inside a group as members of a common subspace. That is, each pixel is represented using a linear combination of a few dictionary elements learned from the data, but since pixels inside a contextual group are often made up of the same materials, their linear combinations are constrained to use common elements from the dictionary. To this end, dictionary learning is carried out with a joint sparse regularizer to induce a common sparsity pattern in the sparse coefficients of a contextual group. The sparse coefficients are then used for classification using a linear support vector machine. Experimental results on a number of real hyperspectral images confirm the effectiveness of the proposed representation for hyperspectral image classification. Moreover, experiments with simulated multispectral data show that the proposed model is capable of finding representations that may effectively be used for classification of multispectral resolution samples.

In this paper, a novel discriminative dictionary learning approach is proposed that attempts to preserve the local structure of the data while encouraging discriminability. The reconstruction error and sparsity inducing ℓ1-penalty of dictionary learning are minimized alongside a locality preserving and discriminative term. In this setting, each data point is represented by a sparse linear combination of dictionary atoms with the goal that its k-nearest same-label neighbors are preserved. Since the class of a new data point is unknown, its sparse representation is found once for each class. The class that produces the lowest error is associated with that point. Experimental results on five common classification datasets, show that this method outperforms state-of-the-art classifiers, especially when the training data is limited.