Feature Transformation is crucial for classic machine learning that aims to generate feature combinations to enhance the performance of downstream tasks from a data-centric perspective. Current methodologies, such as manual expert-driven processes, iterative-feedback techniques, and exploration-generative tactics, have shown promise in automating such data engineering workflow by minimizing human involvement. However, three challenges remain in those frameworks: (1) It predominantly depends on downstream task performance metrics, as assessment is time-consuming, especially for large datasets. (2) The diversity of feature combinations will hardly be guaranteed after random exploration ends. (3) Rare significant transformations lead to sparse valuable feedback that hinders the learning processes or leads to less effective results. In response to these challenges, we introduce FASTFT, an innovative framework that leverages a trio of advanced strategies. We first decouple the feature transformation evaluation from the outcomes of the generated datasets via the performance predictor. To address the issue of reward sparsity, we developed a method to evaluate the novelty of generated transformation sequences. Incorporating this novelty into the reward function accelerates the model's exploration of effective transformations, thereby improving the search productivity. Additionally, we combine novelty and performance to create a prioritized memory buffer, ensuring that essential experiences are effectively revisited during exploration. Our extensive experimental evaluations validate the performance, efficiency, and traceability of our proposed framework, showcasing its superiority in handling complex feature transformation tasks11The code and data are publicly accessible via Github..

Next point-of-interest (POI) recommendation has been a prominent and trending task to provide next suitable POI suggestions for users. Most existing sequential-based and graph neural network-based methods have explored various approaches to modeling user visiting behaviors and have achieved considerable performances. However, two key issues have received less attention: i) Most previous studies have ignored the fact that user preferences are diverse and constantly changing in terms of various aspects, leading to entangled and suboptimal user representations. ii) Many existing methods have inadequately modeled the crucial cooperative associations between different aspects, hindering the ability to capture complementary recommendation effects during the learning process. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel framework Disentangled Contrastive Hypergraph Learning (DCHL) for next POI recommendation. Specifically, we design a multi-view disentangled hypergraph learning component to disentangle intrinsic aspects among collaborative, transitional and geographical views with adjusted hypergraph convolutional networks. Additionally, we propose an adaptive fusion method to integrate multi-view information automatically. Finally, cross-view contrastive learning is employed to capture cooperative associations among views and reinforce the quality of user and POI representations based on self-discrimination. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets validate the superiority of our proposal over various state-of-the-arts. To facilitate future research, our code is available at https://github.com/icmpnorequest/SIGIR2024_DCHL.

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction plays a critical role in various online applications, aiming to estimate the user's click probability. User interest modeling from various interactive behaviors(e.g., click, add-to-cart, order) is becoming a mainstream approach to CTR prediction. We argue that the various user behaviors contain two important intrinsic characteristics: 1) The discrepancy in various behaviors reveals different aspects of user's behavior-specific interests. For example, one may click out of need but pay more attention to the rating when purchasing. 2) The consistency of various behaviors contains user's behavior-invariant interest. For example, the user prefers interacted items rather than other items. Therefore, it is necessary to disentangle the discrepancy and consistency signals from the massive behavior information. Unfortunately, previous methods have yet to study this phenomenon well, which limits the recommendation performance.