Recovering trajectories of all moving vehicles from urban-scale cameras is an attractive but challenging topic for massive video data management. Existing solutions frame it as an iterative image clustering problem. The snapshots from the same vehicle are grouped within a cluster, which is further refined according to the spatial-temporal attributes. However, these approaches exhibit expensive iterative clustering overhead and ineffective exploitation of spatial-temporal clues. Moreover, they are designed for batch processing, facing performance degradation when handling newly collected surveillance data. In this paper, we propose a novel joint representation clustering framework, which recovers trajectories from vehicle snapshots in an efficient and accurate fashion and is inherently suited for processing video streaming data. Technically, spatial-temporal features are explicitly extracted to construct the joint representation, eliminating the need for iterative refinement, which significantly reduces computational overhead. Furthermore, we present a simple yet effective clustering scheme with one-pass scan on joint representations to generate large-scale clusters. To mitigate the dependency on external data, a joint training method based on self-supervised learning is introduced. We conduct extensive experiments in both batch and streaming modes. The results show that in the batch mode, TRACER achieves a speedup of at least 2.3× and yields recovery F1-score improvements of 1.7% − 19.6%. In the streaming experimental setup, it achieves 1.1%−27.6% improvement in F1-score, and reduces the average snapshot processing time by up to 84.8%.

Database parameter automatic tuning is one of the challenging and difficult tasks that database administrators (DBAs) frequently encounter in artificial intelligence (AI) enabled database (DB) systems. Preferentially optimizing key parameters emerges as a critical point in addressing this issue, and it can help identify important parameters by exploring the interactions between parameters. Aiming to overcome the disadvantages of existing methods, we propose a collaborative multi-agents model called CMA+DB to automatically tune DB parameters in an effective and efficient fashion. CMA+DB integrates three components including SAPM (Single-Agent Pre-trained Model), MATM (Multi-Agent Joint Training Model), and PJTM (Probability-based Joint Training Model). SAPM applies the deep deterministic policy gradient to explore the impact of one single agent on DB performance, MATM uses multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradients to find agents that collaboratively work to improve DB performance, and PJTM can enhance parameter tuning by important agents based on a probabilistic selection factor. In the CMA+DB model, each agent is responsible for tuning a portion of the parameters, and multiple agents collaborate to recommend the optimal parameter configuration. This hybrid model can expand the number of tunable parameters in order to perform parameter tuning from the aspects of functions and parameter levels (i.e., global, DB, and session level). Experimental results reveal that CMA+DB obtains the fastest convergence performance (when reaching the largest throughput) of 14.83% faster than the state-of-the-art (SOTA) algorithms in the TPC-C benchmark on average. Essentially, after the phase of SAPM model training, CMA+DB outperforms the performance of the SOTA models in throughput. Furthermore, DB performance of CMA+DB can be improved by 1.758% through the phases of MATM and PJTM model training.

Abstract Currently, it is a challenging problem to make clustering algorithms suitable for arbitrary distributions of data. In this paper, we propose a Micro-cluster Structure Clustering algorithm based on the Weight-constrained Minimum Spanning Tree, called MSC-WMST. Firstly, the original data is standardized and rescaled, where each feature dimension is partitioned into several intervals by a unit length. Specified regions are separated within these intervals based on a given threshold, and data is sampled in these regions. Secondly, an improved weighted-constrained minimum spanning tree is proposed to search for initial micro-clusters from the sampled data. Thirdly, the merging indicator is jointly defined by the local density of micro-clusters and the distance between micro-clusters, and the pairs of micro-clusters that satisfy the maximum merging indicator will be iteratively merged in a bottom-up hierarchical manner to obtain the final cluster structure. In addition, noisy data can be identified by analyzing the characteristics of the minimum spanning tree. Finally, the remaining samples are assigned to the cluster nearest to them. Extensive experiments were conducted on twenty-four datasets, we compared the MSC-WMST algorithm with the state-of-the-art algorithms. The experimental results demonstrate that MSC-WMST exhibits excellent performance in three evaluation metrics.

Traffic prediction is the core task of intelligent transportation system (ITS) and accurate traffic prediction can greatly improve the utilization of public resources. Dynamic interaction of multiple spatial relationships will influence the accuracy of traffic prediction. However, many existing methods only consider static spatial relationships, which restricts the accuracy of the prediction. To address the above problem, in this article, we propose the Dynamic Multi-Graph Fusion Network (DMGF-Net) to model the spatial-temporal correlations in traffic network. In the DMGF-Net, the fusion graph is designed to leverage and extract the various spatial correlations between different regions by fusing spatial graph, semantic graph, and spatial-semantic graph. Further, to dynamically learn the importance of different neighbors, we design the Dynamic Spatial-Temporal Unit (DSTU), which can adjust the aggregation weights of different neighbors by combining the convolution operation and the attention mechanism. It can selectively aggregate spatial-temporal features from different neighbors. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that effectiveness of our model, especially on PEMS08, our model achieves an increase of about 8.55% and 7.55% in terms of MAE and RMSE than the static model STGCN.

Online Event-based social networks (EBSNs), such as Meetup and Whova, which provide platforms for users to publish, arrange and participate in events, have become increasingly popular. A major challenge for managing EBSNs is to generate the most satisfactory event arrangement, i.e. events are scheduled at the reasonable time to attract maximum number of participants. Existing approaches usually focus on assigning a set of events organized by the same group to time intervals, but ignore the competitive relationships among different event organizers, which will lead to event time allocations unacceptable to organizers. Thus, a more intelligent EBSNs platform that allocates social events properly in a global view (i.e. the perspective of platform) is desired. In this paper, we first formally define the problem of Platform-oriented Event Time Allocation (PETA), which contains two parts: the prediction of event feasible time period and the event time allocation. Unfortunately, we find that the PETA problem is NP-hard due to the global conflict constraints on events. Thus, we propose design a greedy algorithm and two approximation algorithms to solve the PETA problem. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on both real and synthetic datasets to test the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithms.

Online Event-based social networks (EBSNs), such as Meetup and Whova, which provide platforms for users to publish, arrange and participate in events, have become increasingly popular. A major challenge for managing EBSNs is to generate the most satisfactory event arrangement. Existing approaches usually focus on assigning a set of events organized to time intervals, but ignore the competitive relationships among different event organizers, which will lead to event time allocations unacceptable to organizers. Thus, a more intelligent EBSNs platform that allocates social events properly in a global view (i.e. the perspective of platform) is desired. In this work, we first formally define the problem of Platform-oriented Event Time Allocation (PETA), which contains two parts: the prediction of event feasible time period and the event time allocation. We propose a method to calculate event feasible time period based on event time prediction, and design a greedy algorithm and two approximation algorithms to solve the PETA problem. Extensive experiments on both real and synthetic datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithms have high effectiveness and efficiency.

Recent advances in localization techniques have fundamentally enhanced social networking services, allowing users to share their locations and location-related contents. This has further increased the popularity of location-based social networks (LBSNs) and produces a huge amount of trajectories composed of continuous and complex spatio-temporal points from people’s daily lives. How to accurately aggregate large-scale trajectories is an important and challenging task. Conventional clustering algorithms (e.g., k -means or k -mediods) cannot be directly employed to process trajectory data due to their serialization, triviality and redundancy. Aiming to overcome the drawbacks of traditional k -means algorithm and k -mediods, including their sensitivity to the selection of the initial k value, the cluster centers and easy convergence to a locally optimal solution, we first propose an optimized k -means algorithm (namely OKM ) to obtain k optimal initial clustering centers based on the density of trajectory points. Second, because k -means is sensitive to noisy points, we propose an improved k -mediods algorithm called IKMD based on an acceptable radius r by considering users’ geographic location in LBSNs. The value of k can be calculated based on r , and the optimal k points are selected as the initial clustering centers with high densities to reduce the cost of distance calculation. Thirdly, we thoroughly analyze the advantages of IKMD by comparing it with the commonly used clustering approaches through illustrative examples. Last, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of IKMD against seven clustering approaches including the proposed optimized k -means algorithm, k -mediods algorithm, traditional density-based k -mediods algorithm and the state-of-the-arts trajectory clustering methods. The results demonstrate that IKMD significantly outperforms existing algorithms in the cost of distance calculation and the convergence speed. The methods proposed is proved to contribute to a larger effort targeted at advancing the study of intelligent trajectory data analytics.

Graph representation learning aims at learning low-dimension representations for nodes in graphs, and has been proven very useful in several downstream tasks. In this article, we propose a new model, Graph Community Infomax (GCI), that can adversarial learn representations for nodes in attributed networks. Different from other adversarial network embedding models, which would assume that the data follow some prior distributions and generate fake examples, GCI utilizes the community information of networks, using nodes as positive(or real) examples and negative(or fake) examples at the same time. An autoencoder is applied to learn the embedding vectors for nodes and reconstruct the adjacency matrix, and a discriminator is used to maximize the mutual information between nodes and communities. Experiments on several real-world and synthetic networks have shown that GCI outperforms various network embedding methods on community detection tasks.

Bike-sharing systems are becoming popular and generate a large volume of trajectory data. In a bike-sharing system, users can borrow and return bikes at different stations. In particular, a bike-sharing system will be affected by weather, the time period, and other dynamic factors, which challenges the scheduling of shared bikes. In this article, a new shared-bike demand forecasting model based on dynamic convolutional neural networks, called SDF , is proposed to predict the demand of shared bikes. SDF chooses the most relevant weather features from real weather data by using the Pearson correlation coefficient and transforms them into a two-dimensional dynamic feature matrix, taking into account the states of stations from historical data. The feature information in the matrix is extracted, learned, and trained with a newly proposed dynamic convolutional neural network to predict the demand of shared bikes in a dynamical and intelligent fashion. The phase of parameter update is optimized from three aspects: the loss function, optimization algorithm, and learning rate. Then, an accurate shared-bike demand forecasting model is designed based on the basic idea of minimizing the loss value. By comparing with classical machine learning models, the weight sharing strategy employed by SDF reduces the complexity of the network. It allows a high prediction accuracy to be achieved within a relatively short period of time. Extensive experiments are conducted on real-world bike-sharing datasets to evaluate SDF. The results show that SDF significantly outperforms classical machine learning models in prediction accuracy and efficiency.

Mining cohesive subgraphs from a network is a fundamental problem in network analysis. Most existing cohesive subgraph models are mainly tailored to unsigned networks. In this paper, we study the problem of seeking cohesive subgraphs in a signed network, in which each edge can be positive or negative, denoting friendship or conflict, respectively. We propose a novel model, called maximal (a, k)-clique, that represents a cohesive subgraph in signed networks. Specifically, a maximal (α, k)-clique is a clique in which every node has at most k negative neighbors and at least ⌈ak⌉ positive neighbors (α ≥ 1). We show that the problem of enumerating all maximal (a, k)-cliques in a signed network is NP-hard. To enumerate all maximal (a, k)-cliques efficiently, we first develop an elegant signed network reduction technique to significantly prune the signed network. Then, we present an efficient branch and bound enumeration algorithm with several carefully-designed pruning rules to enumerate all maximal (a, k)-cliques in the reduced signed network. In addition, we also propose an efficient algorithm with three novel upper-bounding techniques to find the maximum (a, k)-clique in a signed network. The results of extensive experiments on five large real-life datasets demonstrate the efficiency, scalability, and effectiveness of our algorithms.

Destination prediction is an essential task in various mobile applications and up to now many methods have been proposed. However, existing methods usually suffer from the problems of heavy computational burden, data sparsity, and low coverage. Therefore, a novel approach named DestPD is proposed to tackle the aforementioned problems. Differing from an earlier approach that only considers the starting and current location of a partial trip, DestPD first determines the most likely future location and then predicts the destination. It comprises two phases, the offline training and the online prediction. During the offline training, transition probabilities between two locations are obtained via Markov transition matrix multiplication. In order to improve the efficiency of matrix multiplication, we propose two data constructs, Efficient Transition Probability (ETP) and Transition Probabilities with Detours (TPD). They are capable of pinpointing the minimum amount of needed computation. During the online prediction, we design Obligatory Update Point (OUP) and Transition Affected Area (TAA) to accelerate the frequent update of ETP and TPD for recomputing the transition probabilities. Moreover, a new future trajectory prediction approach is devised. It captures the most recent movement based on a query trajectory. It consists of two components: similarity finding through Best Path Notation (BPN) and best node selection. Our novel BPN similarity finding scheme keeps track of the nodes that induces inefficiency and then finds similarity fast based on these nodes. It is particularly suitable for trajectories with overlapping segments. Finally, the destination is predicted by combining transition probabilities and the most probable future location through Bayesian reasoning. The DestPD method is proved to achieve one order of cut in both time and space complexity. Furthermore, the experimental results on real-world and synthetic datasets have shown that DestPD consistently surpasses the state-of-the-art methods in terms of both efficiency (approximately over 100 times faster) and accuracy.

Similarity measure is one of the fundamental task in heterogeneous information network (HIN) analysis. It has been applied to many areas, such as product recommendation, clustering, and Web search. Most of the existing metrics can provide personalized services for users by taking a meta-path or meta-structure as input. However, these metrics may highly depend on the user-specified meta-path or meta-structure. In addition, users must know how to select an appropriate meta-path or meta-structure. In this article, we propose a novel similarity measure in HINs, called Recurrent Meta-Structure (RecurMS)-based Similarity (RMSS). The RecurMS as a schematic structure in HINs provides a unified framework for integrating all of the meta-paths and meta-structures, and can be constructed automatically by means of repetitively traversing the network schema. In order to formalize the semantics, the RecurMS is decomposed into several recurrent meta-paths and recurrent meta-trees, and we then define the commuting matrices of the recurrent meta-paths and meta-trees. All of these commuting matrices are combined together according to different weights. We propose two kinds of weighting strategies to determine the weights. The first is called the local weighting strategy that depends on the sparsity of the commuting matrices, and the second is called the global weighting strategy that depends on the strength of the commuting matrices. As a result, RMSS is defined by means of the weighted summation of the commuting matrices. Note that RMSS can also provide personalized services for users by means of the weights of the recurrent meta-paths and meta-trees. Experimental evaluations show that the proposed RMSS is robust and outperforms the existing metrics in terms of ranking and clustering task.

Structural clustering is a fundamental graph mining operator which is not only able to find densely-connected clusters, but it can also identify hub vertices and outliers in the graph. Previous structural clustering algorithms are tailored to deterministic graphs. Many real-world graphs, however, are not deterministic, but are probabilistic in nature because the existence of the edge is often inferred using a variety of statistical approaches. In this paper, we formulate the problem of structural clustering on probabilistic graphs, with the aim of finding reliable clusters in a given probabilistic graph. Unlike the traditional structural clustering problem, our problem relies mainly on a novel concept called reliable structural similarity which measures the probability of the similarity between two vertices in the probabilistic graph. We develop a dynamic programming algorithm with several powerful pruning strategies to efficiently compute the reliable structural similarities. With the reliable structural similarities, we adapt an existing solution framework to calculate the structural clustering on probabilistic graphs. Comprehensive experiments on five real-life datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approaches.

Mining cohesive subgraphs from a network is a fundamental problem in network analysis. Most existing cohesive subgraph models are mainly tailored to unsigned networks. In this paper, we study the problem of seeking cohesive subgraphs in a signed network, in which each edge can be positive or negative, denoting friendship or conflict respectively. We propose a novel model, called maximal (α, k)-clique, that represents a cohesive subgraph in signed networks. Specifically, a maximal (α, k)-clique is a clique in which every node has at most. negative neighbors and at least [αk] positive neighbors (α ≥ 1). We show that the problem of enumerating all maximal (α, k)- cliques in a signed network is NP-hard. To enumerate all maximal (α,k)-cliques efficiently, we first develop an elegant signed network reduction technique to significantly prune the signed network. Then, we present an efficient branch and bound enumeration algorithm with several carefully-designed pruning rules to enumerate all maximal (α,k)-cliques in the reduced signed network. The results of extensive experiments on five large real-life datasets demonstrate the efficiency, scalability, and effectiveness of our algorithms.

Community discovery plays an essential role in the analysis of the structural features of complex networks. Since online networks grow increasingly large and complex over time, the methods traditionally used for community discovery cannot efficiently handle large-scale network data. This introduces the important problem of how to effectively and efficiently discover large communities from complex networks. In this study, we propose a fast parallel community discovery model called picaso (a parallel community discovery algorithm based on approximate optimization), which integrates two new techniques: (1) Mountain model, which works by utilizing graph theory to approximate the selection of nodes needed for merging, and (2) Landslide algorithm, which is used to update the modularity increment based on the approximated optimization. In addition, the GraphX distribution computing framework is employed in order to achieve parallel community detection over complex networks. In the proposed model, clustering on modularity is used to initialize the Mountain model as well as to compute the weight of each edge in the networks. The relationships among the communities are then simplified by applying the Landslide algorithm, which allows us to obtain the community structures of the complex networks. Extensive experiments were conducted on real and synthetic complex network datasets, and the results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can outperform the state of the art methods, in effectiveness and efficiency, when working to solve the problem of community detection. Moreover, we demonstratively prove that overall time performance approximates to four times faster than similar approaches. Effectively our results suggest a new paradigm for large-scale community discovery of complex networks.

With a huge volume of trajectories being collected and stored in databases, more and more researchers try to discover outlying trajectories from trajectory databases. In this article, we propose a novel framework called relative distance-based trajectory outliers detection (RTOD). In RTOD, we first employed relative distances to measure the dissimilarity between trajectory segments, and then formally defined the outlying trajectories based on distance measures. In order to improve the time performance, we proposed an optimization method that employs R-tree and local feature correlation matrix to eliminate unrelated trajectory segments. Finally, we conducted extensive experiments to estimate the advantages of the proposed approach. The experimental results show that our proposed approach is more efficient and effective at identifying outlying trajectories than existing algorithms. Particularly, we analyzed the effect of each parameter in theory.

Intervention analysis is the common method to reveal relationships between objects in human as well as biological society. Data mining research community is just starting to pay attention to intervention analysis. As the traditional association rules are not successful at measuring intervention, this paper tries to mining intervention rules from time series data of sub-complex system. The main contributions of this study include: (1) introduces a new concept of intervention rules. It can quantitatively detect at what scale, how intensive and how long the intervention does make sense; (2) conduct wavelet transform on time series. The decomposition scale can denotes the intervention scale; (3) proposes a new concept named directional correlation to measure intervention intensity; (4) calculates the intervention intensity between time series data with different time delays. The time delay can uncover after how long the intervention takes place; (5) conducts experiments on real datasets. The results show that intervention rules do exist at different decomposition scale of the original data. Moreover, the number of rules discovered by multi-scale analyzing methods is always 4 or 5 times more than those found by single scale methods. And the stability of rules discovered by the improved multi-scale mining algorithm MMIR* is always 100%, while the stability of rules discovered by the basic multi-scale mining algorithm MMIR fluctuate around 70%.

In rough set theory, upper and lower approximations for a concept will change dynamically as the information system changes over time. How to update approximations based on the original information is an important task that can help improve the efficiency of knowledge discovery. This paper focuses on the approach of dynamically updating approximations when attribute values are coarsened or refined. The main contributions include: (1) defining coarsening and refining attribute values in information systems and introducing the properties and the principles of coarsening and refining attribute values; (2) analyzing the properties for dynamic maintenance in terms of upper and lower approximations with coarsening and refining attribute values; (3) proposing an incremental algorithm for updating the approximations of a concept as coarsening or refining attributes values; and finally (4) validating the efficiency of the proposed approach to handle the dynamic maintenance of the approximations for a given concept. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Applying the concept of organizational structure to social network analysis may well represent the power of members and the scope of their power in a social network. In this paper, we propose a data structure, called Community Tree, to represent the organizational structure in the social network. We combine the PageRank algorithm and random walks on graph to derive the community tree from the social network. In the real world, a social network is constantly changing. Hence, the organizational structure in the social network is also constantly changing. In order to present the organizational structure in a dynamic social network, we propose a tree learning algorithm to derive an evolving community tree. The evolving community tree enables a smooth transition between the two community trees and well represents the evolution of organizational structure in the dynamic social network. Experiments conducted on real data show our methods are effective at discovering the organizational structure and representing the evolution of organizational structure in a dynamic social network.

In order to efficiently retrieve the k closest pairs between two spatial data sets in a specified space, such as in GIS and CAD applications, we propose a novel algorithm to handle the k-closest-pair range-query problem by progressively augmenting the query window instead of finding all objects in the whole space. We first describe a specific range estimation method to compute the circle query range which helps eliminate the unnecessary distance calculations among spatial objects and improve performance. Then, we use R*-tree to store closest pairs and give algorithms for maintaining this structure. Extensive experiments performed with synthetic as well as with real data sets show that the new algorithm outperforms the existing approaches in most cases. In particular, this technique works well when two spatial data sets are identical.