Online interactive recommender systems strive to promptly suggest users appropriate items (e.g., movies and news articles) according to the current context including both user and item content information. Such contextual information is often unavailable in practice, where only the users' interaction data on items can be utilized by recommender systems. The lack of interaction records, especially for new users and items, inflames the performance of recommendation further. To address these issues, both collaborative filtering, one of the most popular recommendation techniques relying on the interaction data only, and bandit mechanisms, capable of achieving the balance between exploitation and exploration, are adopted into an online interactive recommendation setting assuming independent items (i.e., arms). This assumption rarely holds in reality, since the real-world items tend to be correlated with each other. In this paper, we study online interactive collaborative filtering problems by considering the dependencies among items. We explicitly formulate item dependencies as the clusters of arms in the bandit setting, where the arms within a single cluster share the similar latent topics. In light of topic modeling techniques, we come up with a novel generative model to generate the items from their underlying topics. Furthermore, an efficient particle-learning based online algorithm is developed for inferring both latent parameters and states of our model by taking advantage of the fully adaptive inference strategy of particle learning techniques. Additionally, our inferred model can be naturally integrated with existing multi-armed selection strategies in an interactive collaborative filtering setting. Empirical studies on two real-world applications, online recommendations on movies and news, demonstrate both the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed approach.

The importance of mining time lags of hidden temporal dependencies from sequential data is highlighted in many domains including system management, stock market analysis, climate monitoring, and more. Mining time lags of temporal dependencies provides useful insights into the understanding of sequential data and predicting its evolving trend. Traditional methods mainly utilize the predefined time window to analyze the sequential items, or employ statistical techniques to identify the temporal dependencies from a sequential data. However, it is a challenging task for existing methods to find the time lag of temporal dependencies in the real world, where time lags are fluctuating, noisy, and interleaved with each other. In order to identify temporal dependencies with time lags in this setting, this paper comes up with an integrated framework from both system and algorithm perspectives. Specifically, a novel parametric model is introduced to model the noisy time lags for temporal dependencies discovery between events. Based on the parametric model, an efficient expectation maximization approach is proposed for time lag discovery with maximum likelihood. Furthermore, this paper also contributes an approximation method for learning time lag to improve the scalability in terms of the number of events, without incurring significant loss of accuracy.

An efficient delivery of IT services for increasingly complex IT environments demands an intelligent automated solution for resolving existing and potential issues. An automation recommender system, promptly suggesting the most proper scripted resolution to an arriving IT incident ticket, would play a significant role in IT automation services. Hence, developing a comprehensive framework supporting becomes imperative for continuous improvement of automation recommendation.In this paper, we first identify the challenges of IT services followed by a discussion on AISTAR (an intelligent system for online IT ticket automation recommendation) designed and developed to provide them. Specifically, we define and formalize automation recommendation procedure as a multi-armed bandit problem with dependent arms, which is capable of achieving the optimal tradeoff between exploitation of the system for the best automation recommendation and exploration of automation execution information for future recommendation. Two novel multi-armed bandit models are proposed and integrated to handle the aforementioned challenges in IT automation services. Empirical studies on a large ticket dataset from IBM Global Services demonstrate both the effectiveness and efficiency of our intelligent integrated system. AISTAR is earmarked for Cognitive Event Automation for IBM Service delivery.

Many systems, such as distributed operating systems, complex networks, and high throughput web-based applications, are continuously generating large volume of event logs. These logs contain useful information to help system administrators to understand the system running status and to pinpoint the system failures. Generally, due to the scale and complexity of modern systems, the generated logs are beyond the analytic power of human beings. Therefore, it is imperative to develop a comprehensive log analysis system to support effective system management. Although a number of log mining techniques have been proposed to address specific log analysis use cases, few research and industrial efforts have been paid on providing integrated systems with an end-to-end solution to facilitate the log analysis routines.

In large scale and complex IT service environments, a problematic incident is logged as a ticket and contains the ticket summary (system status and problem description). The system administrators log the step-wise resolution description when such tickets are resolved. The repeating service events are most likely resolved by inferring similar historical tickets. With the availability of reasonably large ticket datasets, we can have an automated system to recommend the best matching resolution for a given ticket summary. In this paper, we first identify the challenges in real-world ticket analysis and develop an integrated framework to efficiently handle those challenges. The framework first quantifies the quality of ticket resolutions using a regression model built on carefully designed features. The tickets, along with their quality scores obtained from the resolution quality quantification, are then used to train a deep neural network ranking model that outputs the matching scores of ticket summary and resolution pairs. This ranking model allows us to leverage the resolution quality in historical tickets when recommending resolutions for an incoming incident ticket. In addition, the feature vectors derived from the deep neural ranking model can be effectively used in other ticket analysis tasks, such as ticket classification and clustering. The proposed framework is extensively evaluated with a large real-world dataset.

Maximal automation of routine IT maintenance procedures is an ultimate goal of IT service management. System monitoring, an effective and reliable means for IT problem detection, generates monitoring ticket. In light of the ticket description, the underlying categories of the IT problem are determined, and the ticket is assigned to the corresponding processing teams for problem resolving. Automatic IT problem category determination acts as a critical part during the routine IT maintenance procedures. In practice, IT problem categories are naturally organized in a hierarchy by specialization. Utilizing the category hierarchy, this paper comes up with a hierarchical multi-label classification method to classify the monitoring tickets. In order to find the most effective classification, a novel contextual hierarchy (CH) loss is introduced in accordance with the problem hierarchy. Consequently, an arising optimization problem is solved by a new greedy algorithm named GLabel. Furthermore, as well as the ticket instance itself, the knowledge from the domain experts, which partially indicates some categories the given ticket may or may not belong to, can also be leveraged to guide the hierarchical multi-label classification. Accordingly, a multi-label inference with the domain expert knowledge is conducted on the basis of the given label hierarchy. The experiment demonstrates the great performance improvement by incorporating the domain knowledge during the hierarchical multi-label classification over the ticket data.

Large-scale time series data are prevalent across diverse application domains including system management, biomedical informatics, social networks, finance, etc. Temporal dependency discovery performs an essential part to identify the hidden interactions among the observed time series and helps to gain more insight into the behavior of the applications. However, the time-varying sparsity of the interactions among time series often poses a big challenge to temporal dependency discovery in practice. This paper formulates the temporal dependency problem with a novel Bayesian model allowing for both the sparsity and evolution of the hidden interactions among the observed time series. Taking advantage of the Bayesian modeling, an online inference method is proposed for time-varying temporal dependency discovery. Extensive empirical studies on both the synthetic and real application time series data are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed method.

In disaster management, people are interested in the development and the evolution of the disasters. If they intend to track the information of the disaster, they will be overwhelmed by the large number of disaster-related documents, microblogs, and news, etc. To support disaster management and minimize the loss during the disaster, it is necessary to efficiently and effectively collect, deliver, summarize, and analyze the disaster information, letting people in affected area quickly gain an overview of the disaster situation and improve their situational awareness.

Contextual multi-armed bandit problems have gained increasing popularity and attention in recent years due to their capability of leveraging contextual information to deliver online personalized recommendation services (e.g., online advertising and news article selection). To predict the reward of each arm given a particular context, existing relevant research studies for contextual multi-armed bandit problems often assume the existence of a fixed yet unknown reward mapping function. However, this assumption rarely holds in practice, since real-world problems often involve underlying processes that are dynamically evolving over time.

In recent years, IT service providers have rapidly achieved an automated service delivery model. Software monitoring systems are designed to actively collect and signal event occurrences and, when necessary, automatically generate incident tickets. Repeating events generate similar tickets, which in turn have a vast number of repeated problem resolutions likely to be found in earlier tickets. In this paper, we develop techniques to recommend appropriate resolution for incoming events by making use of similarities between the events and historical resolutions of similar events. Built on the traditional k-nearest neighbor algorithm (KNN), our proposed algorithms take into account false positives often generated by monitoring systems. An additional penalty is incorporated into the algorithms to control the number of misleading resolutions in the recommendation results. Moreover, as the effectiveness of the KNN heavily relies on the underlying similarity measurement, we proposed two other approaches to significantly improve our recommendation with respect to resolution relevance. One approach uses topic-level features to incorporate resolution information into the similarity measurement; the other uses metric learning to learn a more effective similarity measure. Extensive empirical evaluations on three ticket data sets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed methods.

Personalized recommendation services have gained increasing popularity and attention in recent years as most useful information can be accessed online in real-time. Most online recommender systems try to address the information needs of users by virtue of both user and content information. Despite extensive recent advances, the problem of personalized recommendation remains challenging for at least two reasons. First, the user and item repositories undergo frequent changes, which makes traditional recommendation algorithms ineffective. Second, the so-called cold-start problem is difficult to address, as the information for learning a recommendation model is limited for new items or new users. Both challenges are formed by the dilemma of exploration and exploitation. In this paper, we formulate personalized recommendation as a contextual bandit problem to solve the exploration/exploitation dilemma. Specifically in our work, we propose a parameter-free bandit strategy, which employs a principled resampling approach called online bootstrap, to derive the distribution of estimated models in an online manner. Under the paradigm of probability matching, the proposed algorithm randomly samples a model from the derived distribution for every recommendation. Extensive empirical experiments on two real-world collections of web data (including online advertising and news recommendation) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in terms of the click-through rate. The experimental results also show that this proposed algorithm is robust in the cold-start situation, in which there is no sufficient data or knowledge to tune the hyper-parameters.

Inventory management refers to tracing inventory levels, orders and sales of a retailing business. In the current retailing market, a tremendous amount of data regarding stocked goods (items) in an inventory will be generated everyday. Due to the increasing volume of transaction data and the correlated relations of items, it is often a non-trivial task to efficiently and effectively manage stocked goods. In this demo, we present an intelligent system, called iMiner, to ease the management of enormous inventory data. We utilize distributed computing resources to process the huge volume of inventory data, and incorporate the latest advances of data mining technologies into the system to perform the tasks of inventory management, e.g., forecasting inventory, detecting abnormal items, and analyzing inventory aging. Since 2014, iMiner has been deployed as the major inventory management platform of ChangHong Electric Co., Ltd, one of the world's largest TV selling companies in China.

Advanced manufacturing such as aerospace, semi-conductor, and flat display device often involves complex production processes, and generates large volume of production data. In general, the production data comes from products with different levels of quality, assembly line with complex flows and equipments, and processing craft with massive controlling parameters. The scale and complexity of data is beyond the analytic power of traditional IT infrastructures. To achieve better manufacturing performance, it is imperative to explore the underlying dependencies of the production data and exploit analytic insights to improve the production process. However, few research and industrial efforts have been reported on providing manufacturers with integrated data analytical solutions to reveal potentials and optimize the production process from data-driven perspectives.

Maximal automation of routine IT maintenance procedures is an ultimate goal of IT service management. System monitoring, an effective and reliable means for IT problem detection, generates monitoring tickets to be processed by system administrators. IT problems are naturally organized in a hierarchy by specialization. The problem hierarchy is used to help triage tickets to the processing team for problem resolving. In this paper, a hierarchical multi-label classification method is proposed to classify the monitoring tickets by utilizing the problem hierarchy. In order to find the most effective classification, a novel contextual hierarchy (CH) loss is introduced in accordance with the problem hierarchy. Consequently, an arising optimization problem is solved by a new greedy algorithm. An extensive empirical study over ticket data was conducted to validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method.

The advent of Big Data era drives data analysts from different domains to use data mining techniques for data analysis. However, performing data analysis in a specific domain is not trivial; it often requires complex task configuration, onerous integration of algorithms, and efficient execution in distributed environments.Few efforts have been paid on developing effective tools to facilitate data analysts in conducting complex data analysis tasks.

Techniques to efficiently discover, collect, organize, search, and disseminate real-time disaster information have become national priorities for efficient crisis management and disaster recovery tasks. We have developed techniques to facilitate information sharing and collaboration between both private and public sector participants for major disaster recovery planning and management. We have designed and implemented two parallel systems: a web-based prototype of a Business Continuity Information Network system and an All-Hazard Disaster Situation Browser system that run on mobile devices. Data mining and information retrieval techniques help impacted communities better understand the current disaster situation and how the community is recovering. Specifically, information extraction integrates the input data from different sources; report summarization techniques generate brief reviews from a large collection of reports at different granularities; probabilistic models support dynamically generating query forms and information dashboard based on user feedback; and community generation and user recommendation techniques are adapted to help users identify potential contacts for report sharing and community organization. User studies with more than 200 participants from EOC personnel and companies demonstrate that our systems are very useful to gain insights about the disaster situation and for making decisions.