Traditional recommendation systems mainly focus on modeling user interests. However, the dynamics of recommended items caused by attribute modifications (e.g. changes in prices) are also of great importance in real systems, especially in the fast-growing e-commerce environment, which may cause the users’ demands to emerge, shift and disappear. Recent studies that make efforts on dynamic item representations treat the item attributes as side information but ignore its temporal dependency, or model the item evolution with a sequence of related users but do not consider item attributes. In this paper, we propose Core Attribute Evolution Network (CAEN), which partitions the user sequence according to the attribute value and thus models the item evolution over attribute dynamics with these users. Under this framework, we further devise a hierarchical attention mechanism that applies attribute-aware attention for user aggregation under each attribute, as well as personalized attention for activating similar users in assessing the matching degree between target user and item. Results from the extensive experiments over actual e-commerce datasets show that our approach outperforms the state-of-art methods and achieves significant improvements on the items with rapid changes over attributes, therefore helping the item recommendation to adapt to the growth of the e-commerce platform.

Air pollution is a serious urban problem that threatens human health. Therefore, fine-grained pollution events detection has become a concerned issue for environmental management. Algorithms in previous studies identify pollution events as uptrend intervals at hour level. However, a significant part of pollution events caused by traffic and industry can be brief but frequent, which may be neglected under traditional coarse-grained detection. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained analysis of air pollution pattern based on minute-level event detection. Over the real-world deployment in Foshan, these events are analyzed according to their geographical contexts and temporal features. Results show insightful findings and this case study provides a practical reference for government inspection and pollution control.

Mobile sensor networks are widely deployed for air quality monitoring. However, fine-grained pollution inference based on these systems is challenging. Specifically, diverse geospatial attributes in urban areas bring great spatial variations of the pollution field. Besides, the preprocessing on raw samples, such as discretization and averaging, leads to the lost of fine-grained information of mobile sensing. In this paper, we propose an inference algorithm with the attention mechanism to better capture high-frequency information in the pollution field. Furthermore, we introduce the sensing gradients in the attention network to utilize the high-granularity information from the mobile sensors. Evaluations on real-world dataset show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 13.15% ~ 27.04%.

The surveillance of air pollution is becoming a highly concerned issue for city residents and urban administrators. Fixed air quality stations as well as mobile gas sensors have been deployed for air quality monitoring but with sparse observations over the entire temporal-spatial space. Therefore, an inference algorithm is essential for comprehensive fine-grained air pollution sensing. Conventional physically-based models can hardly be applied to all the scenarios, while pure data-driven methods suffer from sampling bias and overfitting problems. This paper presents a hybrid algorithm for air pollution inference by guiding the data learning process with physical model. The quantitative combination of knowledge from observed dataset and a discretized convective-diffusion model is performed within a multi-task learning scheme. Evaluations show that, benefited from physical guidance, our hybrid method obtains higher extrapolation ability and more robustness, achieving the same performance with 1/8 sample amount and obtaining 31.9% less error in noisy synthesized environment. In a real-world deployment in Tianjin, our algorithm outperforms the pure data-driven model with 9.69% less inference error over a 9-day PM2.5data collection.

Mobile sensing systems are deployed for urban air pollution monitoring to increase coverage over a city. However, the sampling irregularity brings great challenges for fine-grained pollution field recovery. To address this problem, we proposed a generative model based inference algorithm. By modeling the air pollution evolution and data sampling process separately, the temporal-spatial correlation of pollution field can be considered with irregular sampled data. We use a convolutional long-short term memory structure in the generative model and train it with the scattered observations from mobile sensing. Evaluations on synthesized data and a deployment in the city of Tianjin show that our algorithm accurately captures fine-grained PM2.5 pollution patterns and changes. The average inference error is 6.7μg/m3, which achieves 23.8% improvement over existing techniques.

Air pollution in a city is the major environmental risk to health. Mobile sensing has become a popular solution in recent years. However, it still suffers from problems such as lack of data and high system uncertainty. This is because that the data amount and distribution vary over time. To address the problems, this paper combines two classic data driven models -- Kriging and Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW). We adopt the Random Forest Algorithm (RF) to adaptively choose the more accurate models (Kriging or IDW) according to the features we extracted. The experiment based on real world testbed shows our adaptive method achieves up to 30.6% error reduction.