In this paper, we present a new scalable and adaptive architecture for FL aggregation. First, we demonstrate how traditional tree overlay based aggregation techniques (from P2P, publish-subscribe and stream processing research) can help FL aggregation scale, but are ineffective from a resource utilization and cost standpoint. Next, we present the design and implementation of AdaFed, which uses serverless/cloud functions to adaptively scale aggregation in a resource efficient and fault tolerant manner. We describe how AdaFed enables FL aggregation to be dynamically deployed only when necessary, elastically scaled to handle participant joins/leaves and is fault tolerant with minimal effort required on the (aggregation) programmer side. We also demonstrate that our prototype based on Ray [1] scales to thousands of participants, and is able to achieve a > 90% reduction in resource requirements and cost, with minimal impact on aggregation latency.

Current state of the art methods for generating Pareto-optimal solutions for multi-objective optimization problems mostly rely on optimizing the hyper-parameters of the models (HPO - hyper-parameter Optimization). Few recent, less studied methods focus on optimizing over the space of model parameters, leveraging the problem specific knowledge. We present a generic first-of-a-kind method, referred to as HyperASPO, that combines optimization over the spaces of both hyper-parameters and model parameters for multi-objective optimization of learning problems. HyperASPO consists of two stages. First, we perform a coarse HPO to determine a set of favorable hyper-parameter configurations. In the second step, for each of these configurations, we solve a sequence of weighted single objective optimization problems for estimating Pareto-optimal solutions. We generate the weights in the second step using an adaptive mesh constructed iteratively based on the metrics of interest, resulting in further refinement of Pareto frontier efficiently. We consider the widely used XGBoost (Gradient Boosted Trees) model and validate our method on multiple classification datasets. Our proposed method shows up to 20% improvement over the hypervolumes of Pareto fronts obtained through state of the art HPO based methods with up to 2× reduction in computational time.

In a customer support scenario, a lot of valuable information is recorded in the form of `case logs'. Case logs are primarily written for future references or manual inspections and therefore are written in a hasty manner and are very noisy. In this paper, we propose techniques that exploit these case logs to mine real customer concerns or problems and then map them to well written knowledge articles for that enterprise. This mapping results into generation of question-answer (QA) pairs. These QA pairs can be used for a variety of applications such as dynamically updating the frequently-asked-questions (FAQs), updating the knowledge repository etc. In this paper we show the utility of these discovered QA pairs as training data for a question-answering system. Our approach for mining the case logs is based on a composite model consisting of two generative models, viz, hidden Markov model (HMM) and latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model. The LDA model explains the long-range dependencies across words due to their semantic similarity and HMM models the sequential patterns present in these case logs. Such processing results in crisp `problem statement' segments which are indicative of the real customer concerns. Our experiments show that this approach finds crisp problem-statements in 56% of the cases and outperforms other alternate methods for segmentation such as HMM, LDA and conditional random field (CRF). After finding these crisp problem-statements, appropriate answers are looked up from an existing knowledge repository index forming candidate QA pairs. We show that considering only the problemstatement segments for which the answers can be found further improves the segmentation performance to 82%. Finally, we show that when these QA pairs are used as training data, the performance of a question-answering system can be improved significantly.

The social Customer Relationship Management (CRM) landscape is attracting significant attention from customers and enterprises alike as a sustainable channel for tracking, managing and improving customer relations. Enterprises are taking a hard look at this open, unmediated platform because the community effect generated on this channel can have a telling effect on their brand image, potential market opportunity and customer loyalty. In this work we present our experiences in building a system that mines conversations on social platforms to identify and prioritize those posts and messages that are relevant to enterprises. The system presented in this work aims to empower an agent or a representative in an enterprise to monitor, track and respond to customer communication while also encouraging community participation.

Lack of supervision in clustering algorithms often leads to clusters that are not useful or interesting to human reviewers. We investigate if supervision can be automatically transferred for clustering a target task, by providing a relevant supervised partitioning of a dataset from a different source task. The target clustering is made more meaningful for the human user by trading-off intrinsic clustering goodness on the target task for alignment with relevant supervised partitions in the source task, wherever possible. We propose a cross-guided clustering algorithm that builds on traditional k-means by aligning the target clusters with source partitions. The alignment process makes use of a cross-task similarity measure that discovers hidden relationships across tasks. When the source and target tasks correspond to different domains with potentially different vocabularies, we propose a projection approach using pivot vocabularies for the cross-domain similarity measure. Using multiple real-world and synthetic datasets, we show that our approach improves clustering accuracy significantly over traditional k-means and state-of-the-art semi-supervised clustering baselines, over a wide range of data characteristics and parameter settings.

Text mining, though still a nascent industry, has been growing quickly along with the awareness of the importance of unstructured data in business analytics, customer retention and extension, social media, and legal applications. There has been a recent increase in the number of commercial text mining product and service offerings, but successful or wide-spread deployments are rare, mainly due to a dependence on the expertise and skill of practitioners. Accordingly, there is a growing need for re-usable repositories for text mining. In this paper, we focus on dictionary-based text mining and its role in enabling practitioners in understanding and analyzing large text datasets. We motivate and define the problem of exploratory dictionary construction for capturing concepts of interest, and propose a framework for efficient construction, tuning, and re-use of these dictionaries across datasets. The construction framework offers a range of interaction modes to the user to quickly build concept dictionaries over large datasets. We also show how to adapt one or more dictionaries across domains and tasks, thereby enabling reuse of knowledge and effort in industrial practice. We present results and case studies on real-life CRM analytics datasets, where such repositories and tooling significantly cut down practitioner time and effort for dictionary-based text mining.

Lack of supervision in clustering algorithms often leads to clusters that are not useful or interesting to human reviewers. We investigate if supervision can be automatically transferred to a clustering task in a target domain, by providing a relevant supervised partitioning of a dataset from a different source domain. The target clustering is made more meaningful for the human user by trading off intrinsic clustering goodness on the target dataset for alignment with relevant supervised partitions in the source dataset, wherever possible. We propose a cross-guided clustering algorithm that builds on traditional k-means by aligning the target clusters with source partitions. The alignment process makes use of a cross-domain similarity measure that discovers hidden relationships across domains with potentially different vocabularies. Using multiple real-world datasets, we show that our approach improves clustering accuracy significantly over traditional k-means.

Data analytics tools and frameworks abound, yet rapid deployment of analytics solutions that deliver actionable insights from business data remains a challenge. The primary reason is that on-field practitioners are required to be both technically proficient and knowledgeable about the business. The recent abundance of unstructured business data has thrown up new opportunities for analytics, but has also multiplied the deployment challenge, since interpretation of concepts derived from textual sources require a deep understanding of the business. In such a scenario, a managed service for analytics comes up as the best alternative. A managed analytics service is centered around a business analyst who acts as a liaison between the business and the technology. This calls for new tools that assist the analyst to be efficient in the tasks that she needs to execute. Also, the analytics needs to be repeatable, in that the delivered insights should not depend heavily on the expertise of specific analysts. These factors lead us to identify new areas that open up for KDD research in terms of 'time-to-insight' and repeatability for these analysts. We present our analytics framework in the form of a managed service offering for CRM analytics. We describe different analyst-centric tools using a case study from real-life engagements and demonstrate their effectiveness.