EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Ya-Lin Zhang 0001
dblp:204/2994 · also Yalin Zhang 0001
· DBLP profile ↗
13ranked-venue papers in the field
5as first author
9since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0002-3244-1084ORCID · verified
Domains — venue-derived; a paper can count in several
Data Mining & Knowledge Discovery · 5 (3 first)Information Retrieval & Web Search · 5 (1 first)Database Systems & Data Management · 3 (1 first)
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | AntAkso: Claims Management System for Health Insurance in AlipayabstractThe rapid growth of health insurance and the rising incidence of fraudulent claims underscore the necessity for an efficient and professional claims management system. However, there is a noticeable lack of shared relevant experience from previous research in this field. In response to this challenge, we introduce AntAkso, a robust claims management system specifically designed for health insurance operations within Alipay. AntAkso incorporates a digital and professional management system, achieving a notable decrease in the volume of false claims, reduction in administrative costs, and heightened satisfaction among its policyholders. We begin by highlighting the core components of this system, including the case stratification, hospital recommendation, and case dispatch modules, along with the pivotal algorithms employed, i.e., the fraud detection, recommendation, and robust satisficing algorithms. We also detail the system's implementation and deployment. We substantiate the proposed system's effectiveness and efficiency with empirical evidence from experiments on a large set of real-world health insurance claims data. Qitao Shi, Jun Zhou 0011, Ya-Lin Zhang 0001, Chaoyi Ma, Yifan Wu 0020, Xiaobo Qin |
KDD (1) | 3 |
| 2024 | Modeling Treatment Effect with Cross-Domain Data
Ya-Lin Zhang 0001, Lu Yu 0006, Biying Chen, Jun Zhou 0011 |
PAKDD (1) | 2 |
| 2024 | Domain Level Interpretability: Interpreting Black-box Model with Domain-specific EmbeddingabstractThe importance of incorporating interpretability into machine learning models has been increasingly emphasized. While previous literature has typically focused on feature level interpretability, such as analyzing which features are important and how they influence the final decision, real-world applications often require domain level interpretability, which relates to a group of features. Domain-level interpretability holds the potential for enhanced informativeness and comprehensibility. Unfortunately, there has been limited research in this direction. In this paper, we address this issue and introduce our proposed method DIDE, which obtains domain-level interpretability from domain-specific latent embeddings. To enhance the effectiveness of the framework, we draw inspiration from the gradient smooth philosophy and propose noisy injection in the embedding space, resulting in smoothed interpretability. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of DIDE, and demonstrate its applications in assisting daily business tasks in Alipay. Ya-Lin Zhang 0001, Caizhi Tang, Lu Yu 0006, Jun Zhou 0011, Qing Cui, Linbo Jiang, Xiaosong Zhao |
WSDM | 1 |
| 2023 | FINRule: Feature Interactive Neural Rule LearningabstractThough neural networks have achieved impressive prediction performance, it's still hard for people to understand what neural networks have learned from the data. The black-box property of neural networks already becomes one of the main obstacles preventing from being applied to many high-stakes applications, such as finance and medicine that have critical requirement on the model transparency and interpretability. In order to enhance the explainability of neural networks, we propose a neural rule learning method-Feature Interactive Neural Rule Learning (FINRule) to incorporate the expressivity of neural networks and the interpretability of rule-based systems. Specifically, we conduct rule learning as differential discrete combination encoded by a feedforward neural network, in which each layer acts as a logical operator of explainable decision conditions. The first hidden layer can act as sharable atomic conditions which are connected to next hidden layer for formulating decision rules. Moreover, we propose to represent both atomic condition and rules with contextual embeddings, with aim to enrich the expressivity power by capturing high-order feature interactions. We conduct comprehensive experiments on real-world datasets to validate both effectiveness and explainability of the proposed method. Lu Yu 0006, Meng Li 0068, Ya-Lin Zhang 0001, Jun Zhou 0011 |
CIKM | 3 |
| 2023 | Treatment Effect Estimation across DomainsabstractTreatment effect estimation is essential in the causal inference literature, which has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Most previous methods assume that the training and test data are drawn from the same distribution, which may not hold in practice since the effect estimators may need to be deployed across domains. Meanwhile, in real-world applications, little or no targeted treatments may be conducted in the new domain. Therefore, we focus on a more realistic scenario in this paper, where treatments and outcomes can be observed in the source domain, but the target domain only contains some unlabeled data, i.e., only features are available. In this scenario, thedistribution shift exists not only in the source data due to the selection bias between the control and treated groups, but also between the source and target data. We propose a novel direct learning framework along with the distribution adaptation and reliable scoring modules. In the distribution adaptation module, we design three specialized density ratio estimators to aid the issue of complex distribution shifts. Even so, we may face the challenge of unreliable pseudo-effects in this framework. To address that, we also design the uncertainty-based reliable scoring module as a vital support, which makes the method more reliable. The experiments are conducted on synthetic data and benchmark datasets, which demonstrate the superiority of our method. Yixuan Sun, Ya-Lin Zhang 0001, Wei Wang 0028, Jun Zhou 0011 |
CIKM | 2 |
| 2023 | ALT: An Automatic System for Long Tail Scenario ModelingabstractIn this paper, we consider the problem of long tail scenario modeling with budget limitation, i.e., insufficient human resources for model training stage and limited time and computing resources for model inference stage. This problem is widely encountered in various applications, yet has received deficient attention so far. We present an automatic system named ALT to deal with this problem. Several efforts are taken to improve the algorithms used in our system, such as employing various automatic machine learning related techniques, adopting the meta learning philosophy, and proposing an essential budget-limited neural architecture search method, etc. Moreover, to build the system, many optimizations are performed from a systematic perspective, and essential modules are armed, making the system more feasible and efficient. We perform abundant experiments to validate the effectiveness of our system and demonstrate the usefulness of the critical modules in our system. Moreover, online results are provided, which fully verified the efficacy of our system. Ya-Lin Zhang 0001, Jun Zhou 0011, Yankun Ren, Xinxing Yang, Meng Li 0068, Qitao Shi |
ICDE | 1 |
| 2023 | A Framework for Detecting Frauds from Extremely Few LabelsabstractIn this paper, we present a framework to deal with the fraud detection task with extremely few labeled frauds. We involve human intelligence in the loop in a labor-saving manner and introduce several ingenious designs to the model construction process. Namely, a rule mining module is introduced, and the learned rules will be refined with expert knowledge. The refined rules will be used to relabel the unlabeled samples and get the potential frauds. We further present a model to learn with the reliable frauds, the potential frauds, and the rest normal samples. Note that the label noise problem, class imbalance problem, and confirmation bias problem are all addressed with specific strategies when building the model. Experimental results are reported to demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework. Ya-Lin Zhang 0001, Yixuan Sun, Meng Li 0068, Yeyu Zhao, Wei Wang 0028, Jun Zhou 0011, Jinghua Feng |
WSDM | 1 |
| 2022 | An Adaptive Framework for Confidence-constraint Rule Set Learning Algorithm in Large DatasetabstractDecision rules have been successfully used in various classification applications because of their interpretability and efficiency. In many real-world scenarios, especially in industrial applications, it is necessary to generate rule sets under certain constraints, such as confidence constraints. However, most previous rule mining methods only emphasize the accuracy of the rule set but take no consideration of these constraints. In this paper, we propose a Confidence-constraint Rule Set Learning (CRSL) framework consisting of three main components, i.e. rule miner, rule ranker, and rule subset selector. Our method not only considers the trade-off between confidence and coverage of the rule set but also considers the trade-off between interpretability and performance. Experiments on benchmark data and large-scale industrial data demonstrate that the proposed method is able to achieve better performance (6.7% and 8.8% improvements) and competitive interpretability when compared with other rule set learning methods. Meng Li 0068, Lu Yu 0006, Ya-Lin Zhang 0001, Xiaoguang Huang, Qitao Shi, Qing Cui, Xinxing Yang, Yanming Fang, Jun Zhou 0011 |
CIKM | 3 |
| 2021 | Constraint-Adaptive Rule Mining in Large Databases
Meng Li 0068, Ya-Lin Zhang 0001, Qitao Shi, Xinxing Yang, Qing Cui, Jun Zhou 0011 |
DASFAA (3) | 2 |
| 2020 | aDMSCN: A Novel Perspective for User Intent Prediction in Customer Service BotsabstractAs one of the core components of customer service bot, User Intent Prediction (UIP) aims at predicting users? intents (usually represented as predefined user questions) before they ask, and has been widely applied in real applications. However, when developing a machine learning system for this problem, two critical issues, i.e., the problem of feature drift and class imbalance, may emerge and seriously deprave the system performance. Moreover, various scenarios may arise due to business demands, making the aforementioned problems much more severe. To address these two problems, we propose an attention-based Deep Multi-instance Sequential Cross Network (aDMSCN) to deal with the UIP task. On the one hand,the UIP task can be subtly formalized as multi-instance learning(MIL) task with an attention-based method proposed to alleviate the influences of feature drift. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to model the problem from a MIL perspective.On the other hand, a ratio-sensitive loss is also developed in our model, which can mitigate the negative impact of class imbalance. Extensive experiments on both offline real-world datasets and on-line A/B testing show that our proposed framework significantly out performs other state-of-art methods for the UIP task. Chilin Fu, Cen Chen 0001, Ya-Lin Zhang 0001, Wenge Rong, Zujie Wen, Jun Zhou 0011, Xiaolong Li 0005, Yu Qiao 0001 |
CIKM | 5 |
| 2020 | SAFE: Scalable Automatic Feature Engineering Framework for Industrial TasksabstractMachine learning techniques have been widely applied in Internet companies for various tasks, acting as an essential driving force, and feature engineering has been generally recognized as a crucial tache when constructing machine learning systems. Recently, a growing effort has been made to the development of automatic feature engineering methods, so that the substantial and tedious manual effort can be liberated. However, for industrial tasks, the efficiency and scalability of these methods are still far from satisfactory. In this paper, we proposed a staged method named SAFE (Scalable Automatic Feature Engineering), which can provide excellent efficiency and scalability, along with requisite interpretability and promising performance. Extensive experiments are conducted and the results show that the proposed method can provide prominent efficiency and competitive effectiveness when comparing with other methods. What's more, the adequate scalability of the proposed method ensures it to be deployed in large scale industrial tasks. Qitao Shi, Ya-Lin Zhang 0001, Xinxing Yang, Meng Li 0068, Jun Zhou 0011 |
ICDE | 2 |
| 2019 | Interpretable MTL from Heterogeneous Domains using Boosted TreeabstractMulti-task learning (MTL) aims at improving the generalization performance of several related tasks by leveraging useful information contained in them. However, in industrial scenarios, interpretability is always demanded, and the data of different tasks may be in heterogeneous domains, making the existing methods unsuitable or unsatisfactory. In this paper, following the philosophy of boosted tree, we proposed a two-stage method. In stage one, a common model is built to learn the commonalities using the common features of all instances. Different from the training of conventional boosted tree model, we proposed a regularization strategy and an early-stopping mechanism to optimize the multi-task learning process. In stage two, started by fitting the residual error of the common model, a specific model is constructed with the task-specific instances to further boost the performance. Experiments on both benchmark and real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. What's more, interpretability can be naturally obtained from the tree based method, satisfying the industrial needs. Ya-Lin Zhang 0001 |
CIKM | 1 |
| 2019 | Distributed Deep Forest and its Application to Automatic Detection of Cash-Out FraudabstractInternet companies are facing the need for handling large-scale machine learning applications on a daily basis and distributed implementation of machine learning algorithms which can handle extra-large-scale tasks with great performance is widely needed. Deep forest is a recently proposed deep learning framework which uses tree ensembles as its building blocks and it has achieved highly competitive results on various domains of tasks. However, it has not been tested on extremely large-scale tasks. In this work, based on our parameter server system, we developed the distributed version of deep forest. To meet the need for real-world tasks, many improvements are introduced to the original deep forest model, including MART (Multiple Additive Regression Tree) as base learners for efficiency and effectiveness consideration, the cost-based method for handling prevalent class-imbalanced data, MART based feature selection for high dimension data, and different evaluation metrics for automatically determining the cascade level. We tested the deep forest model on an extra-large-scale task, i.e., automatic detection of cash-out fraud, with more than 100 million training samples. Experimental results showed that the deep forest model has the best performance according to the evaluation metrics from different perspectives even with very little effort for parameter tuning. This model can block fraud transactions in a large amount of money each day. Even compared with the best-deployed model, the deep forest model can additionally bring a significant decrease in economic loss each day. Ya-Lin Zhang 0001, Jun Zhou 0011, Wenhao Zheng 0001, Ji Feng, Ming Li 0005, Zhiqiang Zhang 0012, Chaochao Chen 0001, Xiaolong Li 0005, Yuan Qi 0001, Zhi-Hua Zhou |
ACM Trans. Intell. Syst. Technol. | 1 |