Understanding the spatiotemporal characteristics of criminal activities in a city, or urban crime dynamics for short, is essential for developing ways to control crime and improve urban safety. While much effort has been devoted to this field, most of the existing studies have led to overly generalized findings, obscuring the ways in which dynamic patterns of criminal activities vary by place, time, and situational context. To address this challenge, this article proposes a novel space-time-context-aware tensor decomposition framework, namelySTCTD-Crime, for an in-depth understanding of urban crime dynamics. Specifically,STCTD-Crimefirst constructs a third-order tensor to represent crime data, which provides an elegant way to model spatial, temporal, and contextual factors simultaneously. Then, it decouples the influence that the three factors exerts on criminal activities via the tensor decomposition, enabling the observation of the extent to which each factor affects crime incidents occurring at different regions, within different time slices, and under different situational contexts. Moreover,STCTD-Crimeexploits spatiotemporal correlations between criminal activities to facilitate the understanding of dynamics by seamlessly integrating a crime-number-guided correlation learning method into the framework. Finally, an alternating optimization based scheme is developed to solve the optimization problem, which results in an efficient urban crime dynamics discovery procedure. Extensive analyses on crime datasets drawn from real-world sources convincingly demonstrate the effectiveness ofSTCTD-Crime.

Sarcasm is a subtle expression that indicates the incongruity between literal meanings and factual opinions. For multimodal posts in social medias which consist of both images and texts, sarcasm expressions are even more widespread. Recent works have paid attentions to Multimodal Sarcasm Target Identification (MSTI), which focuses on detecting aspect terms of mockery or ridicule as sarcasm targets. However, the current MSTI benchmark only contains annotations on fine-grained sarcasm targets within sarcastic samples. In practice, it will be featured by two major limitations. First, there lack annotations on non-sarcasm aspects to inform deep models to perceive the semantic difference between sarcasm targets and non-sarcasm aspects. As a result, deep models will tend to incorrectly recognize non-sarcasm aspects as sarcasm targets. Second, there lack non-sarcasm samples to inform deep models to perceive the inherent semantics of sarcasm intentions. Due to the subtle characteristic of sarcasm expressions, models trained with only fine-grained supervision signals cannot thoroughly understand the sarcasm semantics, making the fine-grained task of sarcasm target identification restricted. Motivated by these limitations, this work reconstructs a more comprehensive MSTI benchmark by introducing both fine-grained non-sarcasm aspect annotations for existing sarcasm samples and non-sarcastic samples as non-sarcasm references to enable deep models to clearly perceive the mentioned information during training. Based on the multi-granularity (i.e., both aspect-level and sample-level) non-sarcasm information introduced into this new benchmark, this work further proposes a pluggable Semantics-aware Sarcasm Target Identification mechanism to enhance sarcasm target identification by modeling the overall semantics of sarcasm intentions via an auxiliary sample-level sarcasm recognition task. By modeling the overall semantics of sarcasm intention, deep models can obtain a more comprehensive understanding on sarcasm semantics, leading to improved performance on fine-grained sarcasm target identification. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate our contribution. Both the dataset and code are available at https://github.com/tiggers23/MSTI-Plus.

Crime prediction, which focuses on forecasting the occurrence of criminal activities across city regions before they occur, constitutes an essential capability of surveillance systems designed to enhance urban security. While much effort has been invested in this field, most of the existing studies pay little attention to the influence of situational contexts on criminal activities, which hinders further improvement in prediction performance. To address this challenge, we propose a novel context-aware Bayesian tensor decomposition framework, namely cBTD-Crime, for citywide multi-step crime prediction. More specifically, cBTD-Crime first constructs a third-order tensor to simultaneously model spatial, temporal, and contextual factors and then applies the CP decomposition to exploit the intricate relationships between the three factors to facilitate the prediction process. To reduce the parameter tuning cost, cBTD-Crime further reformulates the problem from a probabilistic perspective, where a range of carefully selected distributions are placed on the spatial, temporal, and contextual latent factors. Finally, an efficient Gibbs sampling procedure is developed to generate a series of samples and the arithmetic mean is computed to obtain the predicted number of crime incidents. Experimental results show that cBTD-Crime achieves superior performance on real-world crime datasets in terms of different evaluation metrics.

The goal of partial multi-label learning is to induce a multi-label classifier from partial multi-label data where each instance is annotated with a number of candidate labels but only a subset of them are valid. Many of the existing studies either fail to fully utilize instance and label correlations to eliminate noisy labels or build an over-simplified multi-label classifier, both of which are unfavorable for the improvement of generalization performance. In this article, we put forward a novel model named P ml-ilc to learn a multi-label classifier from partial multi-label data. Specifically, P ml-ilc first encodes instances and labels into a compact semantic space and takes full advantage of instance and label correlations to eliminate noisy labels. Then, it induces a linear mapping from the feature space to the label space while exploiting label-specific features and instance correlations to facilitate the multi-label classifier learning process. Finally, the above two steps are combined into a joint optimization problem and an efficient alternating optimization procedure is developed to find a satisfactory solution. Extensive experiments show that P ml-ilc achieves superior performance on both real-world and synthetic partial multi-label datasets in terms of different evaluation metrics.

The joint use of node features and network topology to detect communities is called community detection in attributed networks. Most of the existing work along this line has been carried out through objective function optimization and has proposed numerous approaches. However, they tend to focus only on lower-order details, i.e., capture node features and network topology from node and edge views, and purely seek a higher degree of optimization to guarantee the quality of the found communities, which exacerbates unbalanced communities and free-rider effect. To further clarify and reveal the intrinsic nature of networks, we conduct triangle-oriented community detection considering node features and network topology. Specifically, we first introduce a triangle-based quality metric to preserve higher-order details of node features and network topology, and then formulate so-called two-level constraints to encode lower-order details of node features and network topology. Finally, we develop a local search framework based on optimizing our objective function consisting of the proposed quality metric and two-level constraints to achieve both non-overlapping and overlapping community detection in attributed networks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our framework and its potential in alleviating unbalanced communities and free-rider effect.

The goal of crime prediction is to forecast the number of crime incidents at each region of a city based on the historical crime data. It has attracted a great deal of attention from both academic and industrial communities due to its considerable significance in improving urban safety and reducing financial losses. Although much progress has been made in this field, most of the existing approaches assume that the historical crime data are complete, which does not hold in many real-world scenarios. Meanwhile, crime incidents are affected by multiple factors and have intricate spatial, temporal, and categorical correlations, which are not fully utilized by the current methods. In this article, we propose a novel tensor decomposition based framework, named TD-Crime, to conduct prediction directly on the incomplete crime data. Specifically, we first organize the crime data as a tensor and then apply the nonnegative CP decomposition to it, which not only provides a natural solution to the missing data problem but also captures the spatial, temporal, and categorical correlations implicitly. Moreover, we attempt to exploit the spatial and temporal correlations explicitly by directly learning from the crime data to further improve the forecasting performance. Finally, we obtain a joint optimization problem and present an efficient alternating optimization scheme to find a satisfactory solution. Extensive experiments on the real-world crime datasets show that TD-Crime can address the crime prediction task effectively under different missing data scenarios.

Tourism is an important industry and a popular entertainment activity involving billions of visitors per annum. One challenging problem tourists face is identifying satisfactory products from vast tourism information. Most of travel recommendation methods regard the recommendation procedure as a static process and only focus on immediate rewards. Meanwhile, they often infer user intensions from click behaviors and ignore the informative keywords of the clicked products. To this end, in this article, we present a Keywords-enhanced Deep Reinforcement Learning model (KDRL) framework. Specifically, we formalize travel recommendation as a Markov Decision Process and implement it upon the Actor–Critic framework. It integrates keyword information into the reinforcement learning–(RL) based recommendation framework by devising novel state representation and reward function and learns the travel recommendation and keywords generation simultaneously. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that keywords are explicitly discussed and used in RL-based travel recommendations. Extensive experiments are performed on the real-world datasets and the results clearly show the superior performance of KDRL compared with the baseline methods.

Crime poses a major threat to human life and property, which has been recognized as one of the most crucial problems in our society. Predicting the number of crime incidents in each region of a city before they happen is of great importance to fight against crime. There has been a great deal of research focused on crime prediction, ranging from introducing diversified data sources to exploring various prediction models. However, most of the existing approaches fail to offer fine-scale prediction results and take little notice of the intricate spatial-temporal-categorical correlations contained in crime incidents. In this article, we propose a tailor-made framework called CrimeTensor to predict the number of crime incidents belonging to different categories within each target region via tensor learning with spatiotemporal consistency. In particular, we model the crime data as a tensor and present an objective function which tries to take full advantage of the spatial, temporal, and categorical correlations contained in crime incidents. Moreover, a well-designed optimization algorithm which transforms the objective into a compact form and then applies CP decomposition to find the optimal solution is elaborated to solve the objective function. Furthermore, we develop an enhanced framework which takes a set of pre-selected regions to conduct prediction so as to further improve the computational efficiency of the optimization algorithm. Finally, extensive experiments are performed on both proprietary and public datasets and our framework significantly outperforms all the baselines in terms of each evaluation metric.

Predicting grain losses and waste rate (LWR) is critical for agricultural planning and grain policy development. Capturing the stage interaction and generating robust features are the main challenges in grain LWR prediction. In this article, we propose MTGA, a Multitask Gated recurrent unit (GRU) Autoencoder, approach to 1) obtain the robust feature representation for the prediction task and 2) explore the time-ordered interactions among different stages of the grain chain. Specifically, we design multiple GRU encoder-decoder pairs to co-reconstruct the stage features in a common space for robust feature learning. Then, an attention mechanism is proposed better to fuse the reconstructed features from the GRU encoder-decoder pairs. Furthermore, we utilize the multitask for reconstructed loss and grain LWR prediction. We introduce the reconstructed loss task as an auxiliary task to help us to represent the robust features. Besides, we introduce the LWR prediction as main task to learn the parameters for prediction task. We collected the data with questionnaires, interviews, or data from grain management institutes for experiments. The evaluation results show that grain LWR prediction by our approach achieves the best results compared to several state-of-the-art prediction models. Moreover, our method gains overall performance decline of 12.5-18.3% on mean absolute error and root mean square error metrics.

The prosperity of various indoor positioning technologies makes possible the large collection of tracking data in indoor spaces. Much of the focus has been on several fundamental problems such as indoor localization, indoor space modeling, indoor data cleansing, indexing and querying. However, this paper attempts to analyze customer behavior from a unique indoor tracking data, which will promote the convergence between various applications and the underlying data. In particular, we introduce a real-life indoor tracking data collected at an electrical mall in China. Then, we cluster users into several groups and summarize the most characteristic behaviors of each cluster. Last but not least, we analyze customer's individual behaviors through two aspects: 1) the regression model is used to reveal hot regions where customers are likely to stay in long time; and 2) a transition matrix combined with the connectivity is presented to demonstrate hot paths.

The association-rule-based recommendation model is one of the most widely used commercial recommendation engines in e-commerce websites. Existing studies mostly focus on how to select eligible rules to enhance the recommendation performance, but the efficiency of recommendation has been paid few attentions. To remedy this, this paper develops a distributed-computing framework for improving the computational efficiency of rule-based recommendation. Specifically, a tree-typed structure called Ordered-Patterns Forest (OPF) is designed to compress and store frequent patterns. Then, we transform eligible rules mining to a path-searching problem on OPF, and present a path-searching algorithm running on single machine. Finally, a load-balanced strategy for data partitioning is clarified. Experimental results demonstrate that the efficiency improved remarkably by the proposed OPF, compared with the traditional Brute-Force method.