Data organized in tabular format is ubiquitous in real-world applications, and users often craft tables with biased feature definitions and flexibly set prediction targets of their interests. Thus, a rapid development of a robust, effective, dataset-versatile, user-friendly tabular prediction approach is highly desired. While Gradient Boosting Decision Trees (GBDTs) and existing deep neural networks (DNNs) have been extensively utilized by professional users, they present several challenges for casual users, particularly: (i) the dilemma of model selection due to their different dataset preferences, and (ii) the need for heavy hyperparameter searching, failing which their performances are deemed inadequate. In this paper, we delve into this question: Can we develop a deep learning model that serves as a sure bet solution for a wide range of tabular prediction tasks, while also being user-friendly for casual users? We delve into three key drawbacks of deep tabular models, encompassing: (P1) lack of rotational variance property, (P2) large data demand, and (P3) over-smooth solution. We propose ExcelFormer, addressing these challenges through a semi-permeable attention module that effectively constrains the influence of less informative features to break the DNNs' rotational invariance property (for P1), data augmentation approaches tailored for tabular data (for P2), and attentive feedforward network to boost the model fitting capability (for P3). These designs collectively make ExcelFormer a sure bet solution for diverse tabular datasets. Extensive and stratified experiments conducted on real-world datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms previous approaches across diverse tabular data prediction tasks, and this framework can be friendly to casual users, offering ease of use without the heavy hyperparameter tuning. The codes are available at https://github.com/whatashot/excelformer.

Tabular datasets play a crucial role in various applications.Thus, developing efficient, effective, and widely compatible prediction algorithms for tabular data is important.Currently, two prominent model types, Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (GBDTs) and Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), have demonstrated performance advantages on distinct tabular prediction tasks.However, selecting an effective model for a specific tabular dataset is challenging, often demanding time-consuming hyperparameter tuning.To address this model selection dilemma, this paper proposes a new framework that amalgamates the advantages of both GBDTs and DNNs, resulting in a DNN algorithm that is as efficient as GBDTs and is competitively effective regardless of dataset preferences for GBDTs or DNNs.Our idea is rooted in an observation that deep learning (DL) offers a larger parameter space that can represent a well-performing GBDT model, yet the current back-propagation optimizer struggles to efficiently discover such optimal functionality.On the other hand, during GBDT development, hard tree pruning, entropy-driven feature gate, and model ensemble have proved to be more adaptable to tabular data.By combining these key components, we present a Tree-hybrid simple MLP (T-MLP).In our framework, a tensorized, rapidly trained GBDT feature gate, a DNN architecture pruning approach, as well as a vanilla back-propagation optimizer collaboratively train a randomly initialized MLP model.Comprehensive experiments show that T-MLP is competitive with extensively tuned DNNs and GBDTs in their dominating tabular benchmarks (88 datasets) respectively, all achieved with compact model storage and significantly reduced training duration.The codes and full experiment results are available at https://github.com/jyansir/tmlp.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become widely-used models for semi-supervised learning. However, the robustness of GNNs in the presence of label noise remains a largely under-explored problem. In this paper, we consider an important yet challenging scenario where labels on nodes of graphs are not only noisy but also scarce. In this scenario, the performance of GNNs is prone to degrade due to label noise propagation and insufficient learning. To address these issues, we propose a novel RTGNN (Robust Training of Graph Neural Networks via Noise Governance) framework that achieves better robustness by learning to explicitly govern label noise. More specifically, we introduce self-reinforcement and consistency regularization as supplemental supervision. The self-reinforcement supervision is inspired by the memorization effects of deep neural networks and aims to correct noisy labels. Further, the consistency regularization prevents GNNs from overfitting to noisy labels via mimicry loss in both the inter-view and intra-view perspectives. To leverage such supervisions, we divide labels into clean and noisy types, rectify inaccurate labels, and further generate pseudo-labels on unlabeled nodes. Supervision for nodes with different types of labels is then chosen adaptively. This enables sufficient learning from clean labels while limiting the impact of noisy ones. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our RTGNN framework, and the results validate its consistent superior performance over state-of-the-art methods with two types of label noises and various noise rates.

Clinical risk prediction based on Electronic Health Records (EHR) can assist doctors in better judgment and can make sense of early diagnosis. However, the prediction performance heavily relies on effective representations from multi-dimensional time-series EHR data. Existing solutions usually focus on temporal features or inherent relations between clinical event variables or extract both information in two separate phases. This usually leads to insufficient patient feature information and results in poor prediction performance. Moreover, existing methods based on Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network usually require manual selection of proper Meta-Paths. To solve these problems, we propose the Time-aware Context-Gated Graph Attention Network (T-ContextGGAN). Specifically, we design a GNN based module with Time-aware Meta-Paths and self-attention mechanism to extract both temporal semantic information and inherent relations of EHR data simultaneously and perform automatic Meta-Path selection. To evaluate the proposed model, we extract the first 48 hour EHR data in the first Intensive Care Unit (ICU) admission of three different tasks from two open-source datasets and model various clinical variables on the proposed EHRGraph. Extensive experimental results show the proposed model can effectively extract informative features, and outperform existing state-of-art models in terms of various prediction measures. Our code is available in https://github.com/OwlCitizen/TContext-GGAN.

Dialogue Act (DA) classification is a challenging problem in dialogue interpretation, which aims to attach semantic labels to utterances and characterize the speaker's intention. Currently, many existing approaches formulate the DA classification problem ranging from multi-classification to structured prediction, which suffer from two limitations: a) these methods are either handcrafted feature-based or have limited memories. b) adversarial examples can't be correctly classified by traditional training methods. To address these issues, in this paper we first cast the problem into a question and answering problem and proposed an improved dynamic memory networks with hierarchical pyramidal utterance encoder. Moreover, we apply adversarial training to train our proposed model. We evaluate our model on two public datasets, i.e., Switchboard dialogue act corpus and the MapTask corpus. Extensive experiments show that our proposed model is not only robust, but also achieves better performance when compared with some state-of-the-art baselines.

With the rapid development of mobile apps, the availability of a large number of mobile apps in application stores brings challenges to locate appropriate apps for users. Providing accurate mobile app recommendation for users becomes an imperative task. Conventional approaches mainly focus on learning users' preferences and app features to predict the user-app ratings. However, most of them did not consider the interactions among the context information of apps. To address this issue, we propose a broad learning approach for Context-Aware app recommendation with Tensor Analysis (CATA). Specifically, we utilize a tensor-based framework to effectively integrate app category information and multi-view features on users and apps, respectively, to facilitate the performance of rating prediction. The multidimensional structure is employed to capture the hidden relationships among the app categories and the multiview features. We develop an efficient factorization method which applies Tucker decomposition to learn the full-order interactions among the app categories and features. Furthermore, we employ a group ℓ1-norm regularization to learn the group-wise feature importance of each view with respect to each app category. Experiments on a real-world mobile app dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Querying complex graph databases such as knowledge graphs is a challenging task for non-professional users. In this demo, we present SLQ, a user-friendly graph querying system enabling schemales and structures graph querying, where a user need not describe queries precisely as required by most databases. SLQ system combines searching and ranking: it leverages a set of transformation functions, including abbreviation, ontology, synonym, etc., that map keywords and linkages from a query to their matches in a data graph, based on an automatically learned ranking model. To help users better understand search results at different levels of granularity, it supports effective result summarization with "drill-down" and "roll-up" operations. Better still, the architecture of SLQ is elastic for new transformation functions, query logs and user feedback, to iteratively refine the ranking model. SLQ significantly improves the usability of graph querying. This demonstration highlights (1) SLQ can automatically learn an effective ranking model, without assuming manually labeled training examples, (2) it can efficiently return top ranked matches over noisy, large data graphs, (3) it can summarize the query matches to help users easily access, explore and understand query results, and (4) its GUI can interact with users to help them construct queries, explore data graphs and inspect matches in a user-friendly manner.

Online news reading has become the major method to know about the world as web provide more information than other media like TV and radio. However, traditional online news reading interface is inconvenient for many types of people, especially for those who are disabled or taking a bus. This paper presents a mobile application iNewsBox enabling users to listen to news collected from the Internet. In order to simplify necessary interactions of getting valuable news, we also propose a framework for using implicit feedback to recommend news in this paper. Experiment shows our algorithms in iNewsBox are effective.

Traditional multi-dimensional data analysis techniques such as iceberg cube cannot be directly applied to graphs for finding interesting or anomalous vertices due to the lack of dimensionality in graphs. In this paper, we introduce the concept of graph icebergs that refer to vertices for which the concentration (aggregation) of an attribute in their vicinities is abnormally high. Intuitively, these vertices shall be “close” to the attribute of interest in the graph space. Based on this intuition, we propose a novel framework, called gIceberg, which performs aggregation using random walks, rather than traditional SUM and AVG aggregate functions. This proposed framework scores vertices by their different levels of interestingness and finds important vertices that meet a user-specified threshold. To improve scalability, two aggregation strategies, forward and backward aggregation, are proposed with corresponding optimization techniques and bounds. Experiments on both real-world and synthetic large graphs demonstrate that gIceberg is effective and scalable.

Real-life graphs not only contain nodes and edges, but also have events taking place, e.g., product sales in social networks. Among different events, some exhibit strong correlations with the network structure, while others do not. Such structural correlations will shed light on viral influence existing in the corresponding network. Unfortunately, the traditional association mining concept is not applicable in graphs because it only works on homogeneous data sets like transactions and baskets. We propose a novel measure for assessing such structural correlations in heterogeneous graph data sets with events. The measure applies hitting time to aggregate the proximity among nodes that have the same event. To calculate the correlation scores for many events in a large network, we develop a scalable framework, called gScore, using sampling and approximation. By comparing to the situation where events are randomly distributed in the same network, our method is able to discover events that are highly correlated with the graph structure. We test gScore's effectiveness by synthetic events on the DBLP coauthor network and report interesting correlation results in a social network extracted from TaoBao.com, the largest online shopping network in China. Scalability of gScore is tested on the Twitter network. Since an event is essentially a temporal phenomenon, we also propose a dynamic measure, which reveals structural correlations at specific time steps and can be used for discovering detailed evolutionary patterns.

Real-life graphs not only have nodes and edges, but also have events taking place, e.g., product sales in social networks and virus infection in communication networks. Among different events, some exhibit strong correlation with the network structure, while others do not. Such structural correlation will shed light on viral influence existing in the corresponding network. Unfortunately, the traditional association mining concept is not applicable in graphs since it only works on homogeneous datasets like transactions and baskets.

We bring forward a two-phase semantic service discovery mechanism which supports both the operation matchmaking and operation-composition matchmaking. A serial of experiments on a service management framework show that the mechanism gains better performance on both discovery recall rate and precision than a traditional matchmaker.

BPEL can automate orchestrations for cross-organizational Web services; however, it meets a serious challenge from modeling human-intensive business activities, especially from addressing access control for human coordination considering complex interpersonal relationship in modern business. This paper analyzes the importance of human-intensive processes and introduces several additional types of BPEL constructs, then discusses RBAC Model extracted from BPEL process, finally uses improved FOAF to enhance RBAC Model in BPEL. The goal of our work is to enhance human coordination capability in BPEL-based business processes by using RBAC model and improved FOAF.

Service discovery becomes a key to accelerating the evolution of Web services as the number of services is expected to increase dramatically. Foregoing work on service discovery is primarily based on the interfaces of services through the use of ontology. Ongoing work targets at service behavior, with not only individual message exchanges being captured, but also constraints between these message exchanges. In this paper, we propose a formal approach to expressing the service and query behavior using pi-calculus for service matchmaking. The resulting pi-calculus expressions of services and queries are precise in defining single operations involving message exchanges as well as execution sequence between operations. Based on the formalizations, service matchmaking between a service query and a service description is reasoned through the capability of pi-calculus. Expressing service behavior using pi-calculus is expected to be a promising way to realize intelligent service discovery

ITSGrid is an undergoing joint engineering project designed and developed by advanced computing and system (CCNT) lab in Zhejiang University and Hangzhou Enjoyor Electronics Co. Ltd (Enjoyor). The new features of ITSGrid are originated from two important research projects - DartGrid and DartFlow, and one key engineering project - JTang application server, in CCNT lab. Its goal is to build an integrated intelligent transportation information and service platform (ITISP), to integrate traffic data resources collected by Enjoyor and cooperate existing ITS subsystems and services deployed by Enjoyor, finally serve for transportation construction in China. During building this project, we utilize systematically the grid technology, the semantic Web technology, the Web service technology, the messaging oriented middleware technology