Existing multi-behavior recommendations tend to prioritize performance at the expense of explainability, while current explainable methods suffer from limited generalizability due to their reliance on external information. Neuro-Symbolic integration offers a promising avenue for explainability by combining neural networks with symbolic logic rule reasoning. Concurrently, we posit that user behavior chains (e.g., view->cart->buy) inherently embody an endogenous logic suitable for explicit reasoning. However, these observational multiple behaviors are plagued by confounders, causing models to learn spurious correlations. By incorporating causal inference into this Neuro-Symbolic framework, we propose a novel Causal Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning model for Explainable Multi-Behavior Recommendation (CNRE). CNRE operationalizes the endogenous logic by simulating a human-like decision-making process. Specifically, CNRE first employs hierarchical preference propagation to capture heterogeneous cross-behavior dependencies. Subsequently, it models the endogenous logic rule implicit in the user's behavior chain based on preference strength, and adaptively dispatches to the corresponding neural-logic reasoning path (e.g., conjunction, disjunction). This process generates an explainable causal mediator that approximates an ideal state isolated from confounding effects. Extensive experiments on three large-scale datasets demonstrate CNRE's significant superiority over state-of-the-art baselines, offering multi-level explainability from model design and decision process to recommendation results.

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.

Multivariate time series anomaly detection has shown potential in various fields, such as finance, aerospace, and security. The fuzzy definition of data anomalies, the complexity of data patterns, and the scarcity of abnormal data samples pose significant challenges to anomaly detection. Researchers have extensively employed autoencoders (AEs) and generative adversarial networks (GANs) in studying time series anomaly detection methods. However, relying on reconstruction error, the AE-based anomaly detection algorithm needs more effective regularization methods, rendering it susceptible to the problem of overfitting. Meanwhile, GAN-based anomaly detection algorithms require high-quality training data, significantly impacting their practical deployment. We propose a novel GAN based on a dual-discriminator structure to address these issues. The model first processes the data with the generator to obtain the reconstruction error and then calculates pseudo-labels to divide the data into two categories. One data category is input into the first discriminator, where a minor loss between the data and its reconstructed counterpart is better. The other data category is input into the second discriminator, where a larger loss between the data and its reconstructed counterpart is better. Through this process, the model can effectively constrain the generator, retaining information on normal data during data reconstruction while discarding information on abnormal data. After conducting experiments on multiple benchmark datasets, the proposed GAN based on a dual-discriminator structure achieved good results in anomaly detection, outperforming several advanced methods. Additionally, the model also performed well in practical transformer data.

Multi-Behavior Recommendation (MBR) aims to model personalized user preferences by integrating diverse interaction behaviors (e.g., page view, favorite, add to cart, purchase). However, latent confounders such as contextual influences and social relationships can obscure the true causal effects in real-world scenarios, thereby confounding the model’s prediction. Although existing MBR research extensively explores behavioral dependencies and heterogeneity, it frequently overlooks the impact of latent confounders, thereby limiting its ability to capture users’ genuine preferences. To address the limitations of existing methods, we identify two key challenges in MBR: (1) how to infer latent confounders, and (2) how to mitigate their influence across multi-behavior interactions. To this end, we propose Causal Variational Inference for Deconfounded (CVID) MBR. CVID employs a variational graph autoencoder to model latent uncertainty in multi-behavior interactions and introduces a confounder inference module to generate behavior-specific latent confounders via variational inference. In the conditional diffusion module, noise is progressively injected during the forward process to simulate the dynamic evolution of user preferences, while the reverse process leverages the inferred latent confounders to guide denoising through back-door adjustment, thereby recovering the true causal effects between multi-behavior interactions and the model’s prediction. Extensive experiments on public multi-behavior datasets demonstrate that CVID consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in mitigating confounding effects and improving recommendation accuracy, validating its effectiveness and superiority.

WiFi-based human activity recognition (WiFi-based HAR) has emerged as a technology in recent decades, offering convenient and privacy-friendly applications. However, existing frameworks designed for stable environments encounter challenges when faced with changing circumstances and imbalanced training datasets in realistic scenarios. In this article, we address both issues from a unified perspective by exploring a more generalized local minima. Initially, we revisit existing solutions and empirically observe the presence of sharp minima in trained long-tailed WiFi-based HAR models. Consequently, we propose a novel method called Class Region Flattening ( CRF ) to identify class-conditional flat minima. This approach effectively mitigates bias caused by the long-tailed distribution and enhances generalization capabilities in the face of changing circumstances. Furthermore, we introduce a selective flattening operation to prevent optimization conflicts among different activity categories and reduce computational overhead. We integrate CRF into mainstream WiFi-based HAR models and evaluate their performance using our collected WiFi-based HAR dataset. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that the incorporation of CRF leads to significant improvements in performance. These findings underscore the effectiveness of CRF in addressing the challenges posed by changing circumstances and imbalanced training datasets in WiFi-based HAR.

Detecting significant communities via an algorithmic game-theoretic model has recently shown great promise, which seeks to formulate community detection as a competitive game, enabling us to study the network's potential structure with a systematic tool. However, fully leveraging its potential to uncover the mechanism behind community formation remains a challenge. Here we proposeSCG—a Sequential Community Game model to track and characterize the network's structural property. Unlike conventional formulations where individual nodes are treated as players, our model considers communities as players who strive to maximize their structural utility by strategically selecting member nodes. By prioritizing significant communities sequentially,SCGenables differentiation between uncovered communities. Importantly, we establish the existence of a strict Nash equilibrium inSCG, suggesting its ability to capture a stable community structure. We run extensive experiments on several synthetic and real-world networks to testSCG's performance. Results show thatSCGcan help us well track the network's structural properties and also give us reliable performance compared to related baselines.

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.

Community detection on social networks is a fundamental and crucial task in the research field of social computing. Here we proposeDSCPCD—a dual structural consistency preserving community detection method to uncover the hidden community structure, which is designed regarding two criteria: 1) users interact with each other in a manner combining uncertainty and certainty; 2) original explicit network (two linked users are friends) and potential implicit network (two linked users have common friends) should have a consistent community structure, i.e.,dual structural consistency. Particularly,DSCPCDformulates each user in a social network as an individual in an evolutionary game associated with community-aware payoff settings, where the community state evolves under the guidance of replicator dynamics. To further seek each user's membership, we develop ahappinessindex to measure all users’ satisfaction towards two community structures in explicit and implicit networks, meanwhile, the dual community structural consistency between the two networks is also characterized. Specifically, each user is assumed to maximize thehappinessbounded by the evolutionary community state. We evaluateDSCPCDon several real-world and synthetic datasets, and the results show that it can yield substantial performance gains in terms of detection accuracy over several baselines.

Session-based travel packages recommendation aims to predict users’ next click based on their current and historical sessions recorded by Online Travel Agencies (OTAs). Recently, an increasing number of studies attempted to apply Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to the session-based recommendation and obtained promising results. However, most of them do not take full advantage of the explicit latent structure from attributes of items, making learned representations of items less effective and difficult to interpret. Moreover, they only combine historical sessions (long-term preferences) with a current session (short-term preference) to learn a unified representation of users, ignoring the effects of historical sessions for the current session. To this end, this article proposes a novel session-based model named STR-VGAE, which fills subtasks of the travel packages recommendation and variational graph auto-encoders simultaneously. STR-VGAE mainly consists of three components: travel packages encoder , users behaviors encoder , and interaction modeling . Specifically, the travel packages encoder module is used to learn a unified travel package representation from co-occurrence attribute graphs by using multi-view variational graph auto-encoders and a multi-view attention network. The users behaviors encoder module is used to encode user’ historical and current sessions with a personalized GNN, which considers the effects of historical sessions on the current session, and coalesce these two kinds of session representations to learn the high-quality users’ representations by exploiting a gated fusion approach. The interaction modeling module is used to calculate recommendation scores over all candidate travel packages. Extensive experiments on a real-life tourism e-commerce dataset from China show that STR-VGAE yields significant performance advantages over several competitive methods, meanwhile provides an interpretation for the generated recommendation list.

This paper explores human activities recognition from sensor-based multi-dimensional streams. Recently, deep learning-based methods such as LSTM and CNN have achieved important progress in practical application scenarios. However, in most previous deep learning-based methods exist potential challenges such as class imbalance and multi-modal heterogeneity with time and sensor signals. To handle those problems, we propose a graph LSTM and Metric Learning model (GLML) with multiple construction graph fusion by modeling the sensor-aspect signals and the graph-aspect activities. GLML is a semi-supervised co-training architecture, which can be seen as several iteratively pseudo-labels sampling processing in the unlabeled data. Specifically, we construct three graphs to capture the different relations in each timestamp. Meanwhile, the graph attention model and attention mechanism are proposed to integrate multiple graph interactions for different sensor signals. Furthermore, to obtain a fixed representation of hidden state units and their neighboring nodes, we introduce the Graph LSTM to learn the graph-aspect relations from graph-structured constructed graphs. Notably, we propose a multi-task classification model combining loss function for classification distribution with deep metric learning to enhance the representation ability of the multi-modal sensor data. Experimental results on three public datasets demonstrate that our proposed GLML model has at least 2.44% improved in average against the state-of-the-art methods.

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.

Spammers, who manipulate online reviews to promote or suppress products, are flooding in online commerce. To combat this trend, there has been a great deal of research focused on detecting review spammers, most of which design diversified features and thus develop various classifiers. The widespread growth of crowdsourcing platforms has created large-scale deceptive review writers who behave more like normal users, that the way they can more easily evade detection by the classifiers that are purely based on fixed characteristics. In this paper, we propose a hybrid semisupervised learning model titled hybrid PU-learning-based spammer detection (hPSD) for spammer detection to leverage both the users' characteristics and the user-product relations. Specifically, the hPSD model can iteratively detect multitype spammers by injecting different positive samples, and allows the construction of classifiers in a semisupervised hybrid learning framework. Comprehensive experiments on movie dataset with shilling injection confirm the superior performance of hPSD over existing baseline methods. The hPSD is then utilized to detect the hidden spammers from real-life Amazon data. A set of spammers and their underlying employers (e.g., book publishers) are successfully discovered and validated. These demonstrate that hPSD meets the real-world application scenarios and can thus effectively detect the potentially deceptive review writers.

Summary Various online contents on Internet platforms or search engines are related to the corporate reputation. Facing the huge amount of online contents, we need a mining method that can automatically extract and analyze a large number of network‐related information and obtain the real reliability of aspect for the content claimed by companies. In this paper, we propose to generate a ranking model to verify whether the sales‐rankings claimed by companies are trustworthy. The key idea is that the company that has higher confidence score should be supported by the online media. We use a unique data set of public opinion data related with a specific company, which we supplement with data from various online news platform and retrieval webpages using a distributed and generic Web crawler. Meanwhile, basic information and open financial data of companies are also collected for auxiliary analysis. We present a Maximal Marginal Relevance‐based ranking model to compute the confidence score of each company, taking into consideration the two technologies of word embedding and KL‐Divergence to filter the irrelevant documents. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method outperforms the state‐of‐the‐art MMR‐based method, and we showcase three representative cases about the corporate reputation built by us that gives positive, neutral, and negative support respectively to the sales‐ranking claim of companies.

Driven by profits, spam reviews for product promotion or suppression become increasingly rampant in online shopping platforms. This paper focuses on detecting hidden spam users based on product reviews. In the literature, there have been tremendous studies suggesting diversified methods for spammer detection, but whether these methods can be combined effectively for higher performance remains unclear. Along this line, a hybrid PU-learning-based Spammer Detection (hPSD) model is proposed in this paper. On one hand, hPSD can detect multi-type spammers by injecting or recognizing only a small portion of positive samples, which meets particularly real-world application scenarios. More importantly, hPSD can leverage both user features and user relations to build a spammer classifier via a semi-supervised hybrid learning framework. Experimental results on movie data sets with shilling injection show that hPSD outperforms several state-of-the-art baseline methods. In particular, hPSD shows great potential in detecting hidden spammers as well as their underlying employers from a real-life Amazon data set. These demonstrate the effectiveness and practical value of hPSD for real-life applications.

Community detection is a long-standing yet very difficult task in social network analysis. It becomes more challenging as many online social networking sites are evolving into super-large scales. Numerous methods have been proposed for community detection from massive networks, but how to reconcile the partitioning efficiency and the community quality remains an open problem. In this paper, we attempt to address this challenge by introducing a COSine-pattern-based COMmunity extraction framework: COSCOM. The COSCOM adopts an extracting view of community detection. It first extracts the so-called asymptotically equivalent structures (AESs) from networks, from which the nodes are further partitioned into crisp communities using any of the existing methods. Specifically, we prove that an AES is a very tight group of nodes, and is actually a cosine pattern defined by the extended cosine similarity. A novel cosine-pattern mining algorithm based on the ordered anti-monotone of cosine similarity is thus proposed for the efficient extraction of AESs. Experiments on various real-world social networks demonstrate the advantage of the extracting view of community detection. In particular, COSCOM shows merits in detecting genuine communities by either internal or external validity.

Collaborative filtering (CF) based recommender systems are vulnerable to shilling attacks. In some leading e-commerce sites, there exists a large number of unlabeled users, and it is expensive to obtain their identities. Existing research efforts on shilling attack detection fail to exploit these unlabeled users. In this article, Semi-SAD, a new semi-supervised learning based shilling attack detection algorithm is proposed. Semi-SAD is trained with the labeled and unlabeled user profiles using the combination of naïve Bayes classifier and EM-», augmented Expectation Maximization (EM). Experiments on MovieLens datasets show that our proposed Semi-SAD is efficient and effective.