Time series forecasting is crucial for various applications, such as weather forecasting, power load forecasting, and financial analysis. In recent studies, MLP-mixer models for time series forecasting have been shown as a promising alternative to transformer-based models. However, the performance of these models is still yet to reach its potential. In this paper, we propose Wavelet Patch Mixer (WPMixer), a novel MLP-based model, for long-term time series forecasting, which leverages the benefits of patching, multi-resolution wavelet decomposition, and mixing. Our model is based on three key components: (i) multi-resolution wavelet decomposition, (ii) patching and embedding, and (iii) MLP mixing. Multi-resolution wavelet decomposition efficiently extracts information in both the frequency and time domains. Patching allows the model to capture an extended history with a look-back window and enhances capturing local information while MLP mixing incorporates global information. Our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art MLP-based and transformer-based models for long-term time series forecasting in a computationally efficient way, demonstrating its efficacy and potential for practical applications.

Recommender systems are widely used in electronic commerce, social media and online streaming services to provide personalized recommendations to the users by exploiting past ratings and interactions. This paper considers the security aspect with quick and accurate detection of attacks by observing the newly created profiles sequentially to prevent the damage which may be incurred by the injection of new profiles with dishonest ratings. The proposed framework consists of a latent variable model, which is trained by a variational EM algorithm, followed by a sequential detection algorithm. The latent variable model generates homogeneous representations of the users given their rating history and mixed data-type attributes such as age and gender. The representations are then exploited to generate univariate statistics to be efficiently used in a CUSUM-like sequential detection algorithm that can quickly detect persistent attacks while maintaining low false alarm rates. We apply our proposed framework to three different real-world datasets and exhibit superior performance in comparison to the existing baseline algorithms for both attack profile and sequential detection. Furthermore, we demonstrate robustness to different attack strategies and configurations.

Malicious profiles have been a credible threat to collaborative recommender systems. Attackers provide fake item ratings to systematically manipulate the platform. Attack detection algorithms can identify and remove such users by observing rating distributions. In this study, we aim to use the user attributes as an additional information source to improve the accuracy and speed of attack detection. We propose a probabilistic factorization model which can embed mixed data type user attributes and observed ratings into a latent space to generate anomaly statistics for new users. To identify the persistent outliers in the system, we also propose a sequential attack detection algorithm to enable quick and accurate detection based on the probabilistic model learned from genuine users. The proposed model demonstrates significant improvements in both accuracy and speed when compared to baseline algorithms on a popular benchmark dataset.

In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal framework for matrix completion where the missing values are accumulatively estimated with feature-based neural networks. Specifically, for each individual feature, a different model is trained to predict the missing values in the observations using the remaining features as input to provide an initial estimate. These estimates are then used to initiate the next round of model training to iteratively converge to the final prediction of the missing value. The weight parameters of the networks are propagated through these accumulative iterations which leads to a computationally efficient algorithm where training times become progressively shorter with each round. Unlike traditional algorithms relying on matrix factorization, separating the model building and exploiting steps also enables more effective deployment in online applications. Results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms prior work in 80% of the test scenarios when compared to four universally accepted methods on a combination of different datasets and missing data ratios.