Event extraction is a long-standing and challenging task in natural language processing, and existing studies mainly focus on extracting events within sentences. However, a significant problem that has not been carefully investigated is whether an “event topic” can be identified to represent the main aspects of extracted events. This article formulates the “topic event” extraction problem, aiming to identify a representative event from extracted ones. Specifically, after defining the topic event, we develop a multifocal graph-based framework to handle the extraction task. To enrich the associations of events and their tokens, we construct four event graphs, including the event subgraph and three event-associated graphs (i.e., event dependency parsing graph, event organization graph, and event share token graph), that reflect the internal and external structures of events, respectively. Subsequently, we design a multi-attention event-graph neural network to capture these event graph structures and improve event subgraph embedding. Finally, the output embeddings in the last layer of each channel are concatenated and fed into a fully connected network for topic event recognition. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our method, and the results confirm its superiority over state-of-the-art baselines. In-depth analyses explore the essential factors (e.g., graph structures, attentions, feature generation method, etc.) determining the extraction performance.

Existing models on event detection share three-fold limitations, including (1) insufficient consideration of the structures between dependency relations, (2) limited exploration of the directed-edge semantics, and (3) issues in strengthening the event core arguments. To tackle these problems, we propose a dependency structure-enhanced event detection framework. In addition to the traditional token dependency parsing tree, denoted as TDG, our model considers the dependency edges in it as new nodes and constructs a dependency relation graph (DRG). DRG allows the embedding representations of dependency relations to be updated as nodes rather than edges in a graph neural network. Moreover, the levels of core argument nodes in the two graphs are adjusted by dependency relation types in TDG to enhance their status. Subsequently, the two graphs are further encoded and jointly trained in graph attention networks (GAT). Importantly, we design an interaction strategy of node embedding for the two graphs and refine the attention coefficient computational method to encode the semantic meaning of directed edges. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our method, and the results confirm its superiority over the state-of-the-art baselines. Our model outperforms the best benchmark with the F1 score increased by 3.5 and 3.4 percentage points on ACE2005 English and Chinese corpus.

Document-level event extraction is a long-standing challenging information retrieval problem involving a sequence of sub-tasks: entity extraction, event type judgment, and event type-specific multi-event extraction. However, addressing the problem as multiple learning tasks leads to increased model complexity. Also, existing methods insufficiently utilize the correlation of entities crossing different events, resulting in limited event extraction performance. This article introduces a novel framework for document-level event extraction, incorporating a new data structure called token-event-role and a multi-channel argument role prediction module. The proposed data structure enables our model to uncover the primary role of tokens in multiple events, facilitating a more comprehensive understanding of event relationships. By leveraging the multi-channel prediction module, we transform entity and multi-event extraction into a single task of predicting token–event pairs, thereby reducing the overall parameter size and enhancing model efficiency. The results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 9.5 percentage points in terms of the F 1 score, highlighting its superior performance in event extraction. Furthermore, an ablation study confirms the significant value of the proposed data structure in improving event extraction tasks, further validating its importance in enhancing the overall performance of the framework.

Learning topic hierarchies from a multi-domain corpus is crucial in topic modeling as it reveals valuable structural information embedded within documents. Despite the extensive literature on hierarchical topic models, effectively discovering inter-topic correlations and differences among subtopics at the same level in the topic hierarchy, obtained from multiple domains, remains an unresolved challenge. This article proposes an enhanced nested Chinese restaurant process (nCRP), nCRP+, by introducing an additional mechanism based on Chinese restaurant franchise (CRF) for aspect-sharing pattern extraction in the original nCRP. Subsequently, by employing the distribution extracted from nCRP+ as the prior distribution for topic hierarchy in the hierarchical Dirichlet processes (HDP), we develop a hierarchical topic model for multi-domain corpus, named rHDP. We describe the model with the analogy of Chinese restaurant franchise based on the central kitchen and propose a hierarchical Gibbs sampling scheme to infer the model. Our method effectively constructs well-established topic hierarchies, accurately reflecting diverse parent-child topic relationships, explicit topic aspect sharing correlations for inter-topics, and differences between these shared topics. To validate the efficacy of our approach, we conduct experiments using a renowned public dataset and an online collection of Chinese financial documents. The experimental results confirm the superiority of our method over the state-of-the-art techniques in identifying multi-domain topic hierarchies, according to multiple evaluation metrics.

Qizhi Wan, Changxuan Wan, Keli Xiao, Dexi Liu, Chenliang Li, Bolong Zheng, Xiping Liu, Rong Hu. Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2023.

Career mobility forecasting and recommendation are important topics in talent management research. While existing models have extensively covered short-term, single-period recommendations and long-term, unconstrained career path suggestions, the user preference-constrained career path optimization problem remains underexplored. This paper addresses the common scenario where individuals have approximate career plans and seek to optimize their career trajectories by incorporating specific user preferences. We develop an exploration space-aware stochastic searching algorithm that incorporates a deep learning-guided searching space determination module and a position transit prediction module. We mathematically demonstrate its strengths in exploring optimal path solutions with fixed components predefined by users. Finally, we empirically validate the superiority of our method using a comprehensive real-world dataset, comparing it against state-of-the-art approaches.

Dynamic systems are often monitored with multivariate time series where each dimension represents a local component measured through a (virtual) sensor. Performing accurate diagnostic for dynamic systems while simultaneously taking into account their similarities/distinctions, is a non-trivial task. To this end, we develop an adaptive regularization approach to learning sparse connectivity structures in complex dynamic systems. The learned connectivity networks shed lights on the structural compositions of the system and hence can serve as highly informative inputs for various machine learning tasks such as classification. In particular, we focus on high-dimensional and semi-supervised learning scenarios and present a joint learning approach to recover system-wise connectivity patterns by adaptively constructing a shared, sparsity-inducing regularization template across all systems. The shared template can be physically interpreted and used as a modeling template for analyzing new systems. Moreover, our approach has the flexibility to incorporate supervising information such as must-links and cannot-links for constructing regularization templates. Overall, our approach, named sparse adaptive regularization (SAR), can extract structure-related connectivity features efficiently and effectively, and result in significant improvements for machine learning tasks in dynamic systems. We benchmark our approach against the state-of-the-art methods with real-world data. Our results demonstrate the superiority of our approach.

Event extraction is an essential task in natural language processing. Although extensively studied, existing work shares issues in three aspects, including (1) the limitations of using original syntactic dependency structure, (2) insufficient consideration of the node level and type information in Graph Attention Network (GAT), and (3) insufficient joint exploitation of the node dependency type and part-of-speech (POS) encoding on the graph structure. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework for open event extraction in documents. Specifically, to obtain an enhanced dependency structure with powerful encoding ability, our model is capable of handling an enriched parallel structure with connected ellipsis nodes. Moreover, through a bidirectional dependency parsing graph, it considers the sequence of order structure and associates the ancestor and descendant nodes. Subsequently, we further exploit node information, such as the node level and type, to strengthen the aggregation of node features in our GAT. Finally, based on the coordination of triple-channel features (i.e., semantic, syntactic dependency and POS), the performance of event extraction is significantly improved. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our method, and the results confirm its superiority over the state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, in-depth analyses are provided to explore the essential factors determining the extraction performance.

As a key decision-making process in compensation and benefits (C&B) in human resource management, job salary benchmarking (JSB) plays an indispensable role in attracting, motivating, and retaining talent. Whereas the existing research mainly focuses on revealing the essential impacts of personal and organizational characteristics and economic factors on labor costs (e.g., C&B), few studies target optimizing JSB from a practical, data-driven perspective. Traditional approaches suffer from issues that result from using small and sparse data as well as from the limitations of linear statistical models in practice. Furthermore, there are also important technical issues that need to be addressed in the small number of machine learning–based JSB approaches, such as “cold start” issues when considering a brand-new type of company or job or model interpretability issues. To this end, we propose to address the JSB problem with data-driven techniques from a fine-grained perspective by modeling large-scale, real-world online recruitment data. Specifically, we develop a nonparametric Dirichlet process–based latent factor model (NDP-JSB) to jointly model the latent representations of both company and job position and then apply the model to predict salaries based on company and position information. Our model strengthens the usage of data-driven approaches in JSB optimization by addressing the aforementioned issues in existing models. For evaluation, extensive experiments are conducted on two large-scale, real-world data sets. Our results validate the effectiveness of the NDP-JSB and demonstrate its strength in providing interpretable salary benchmarking to benefit complex decision-making processes in talent management. Summary of Contribution: This paper bridges the cutting-edge machine learning techniques to their implementation in a practical operation research problem in human resources. We focus on optimizing the salary-matching work to help the companies to seek reasonable salaries for their positions by proposing a data-driven approach to capture hidden patterns from user and company profiles. The contributions of this work reside in both operation research and computing. We (1) formulate the JSB optimization problem and (2) solve it by developing a data-driven method along with an effective algorithm optimization. Moreover, the proposed methodology has strengths in addressing the issues of data sparseness and result interpretability.

Word segmentation is an essential and challenging task in natural language processing, especially for the Chinese language due to its high linguistic complexity. Existing methods for Chinese word segmentation, including statistical machine learning methods and neural network methods, usually have good performance in specific knowledge domains. Given the increasing importance of interdisciplinary and cross-domain studies, one of the challenges in cross-domain word segmentation is to handle the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. Existing methods show unsatisfactory performance to meet the practical standard. To this end, we propose a document-level context-aware model that can automatically perceive and identify OOV words from different domains. Our method jointly implements a word-based and a character-based model and then processes the results with a newly proposed reconstruction model. We evaluate the new method by designing and conducting comprehensive experiments on two real-world datasets (e.g., news from different domains). The results demonstrate the superiority of our method over the state-of-the-art models in handling texts from different domains. Importantly, when doing the word segmentation under the cross-domain scenario, our proposed method can improve the performance of OOV words recognition.

We construct a Chinese Economic Event Treebank (CEETB) , focusing on revealing economic and finance events and their relations. Investigating economic event relations will benefit academic research and practice in not just economics but many other scientific areas. The characteristics of economic-related texts (e.g., abundant longer enterprises names and terms) and the Chinese language speciality (e.g., component ellipsis in long sentences) have resulted in challenges in the event relation extraction task. Existing Chinese corpora containing economic event relations mainly focused on finance areas (e.g., the equity market) and only covered a few event types. To support research that may involve economic text analysis in Chinese, our CEETB is constructed following a carefully designed process. First, based on practical and research requirements, we summarize nine different types of event relations and four types of component ellipses in economic texts. Then, an excellent annotation scheme is presented to hyalinize the model, strategy, and process in annotation, followed by statistical analysis and quality evaluation for the CEETB corpus. Finally, to demonstrate the strengths of the constructed corpus in practical applications, we conduct experiments on five SOTA models for event relation extraction.

This paper investigates the stochastic optimization problem focusing on developing scalable parallel algorithms for deep learning tasks. Our solution involves a reformation of the objective function for stochastic optimization in neural network models, along with a novel parallel computing strategy, coined the weighted aggregating stochastic gradient descent (WASGD). Following a theoretical analysis on the characteristics of the new objective function,WASGDintroduces a decentralized weighted aggregating scheme based on the performance of local workers. Without any center variable, the new method automatically gauges the importance of local workers and accepts them by their contributions. Furthermore, we have developed an enhanced version of the method,WASGD+, by (1) implementing a designed sample order and (2) upgrading the weight evaluation function. To validate the new method, we benchmark our pipeline against several popular algorithms including the state-of-the-art deep neural network classifier training techniques (e.g., elastic averaging SGD). Comprehensive validation studies have been conducted on four classic datasets:CIFAR-100,CIFAR-10,Fashion-MNIST, andMNIST. Subsequent results have firmly validated the superiority of theWASGDscheme in accelerating the training of deep architecture. Better still, the enhanced version,WASGD+, is shown to be a significant improvement over its prototype.

In today’s fast-evolving job market, the timely and effective understanding of the career trajectories of talents can help them quickly develop necessary skills and make the right career transitions at the right time. However, it is a non-trivial task for developing a successful career trajectory prediction method, which should have the abilities for finding the right timing for job-hopping, identifying the right companies, and matching the right positions for the candidates. While people have been trying to develop solutions for providing some of the above abilities, there is no total solution or complete framework to integrate all these abilities together. To this end, in this paper, we propose a unified time-aware career trajectory prediction framework, namely TACTP, which is capable of jointly providing the above three abilities for better understanding the career trajectories of talents. Along this line, we first exploit a hierarchical deep sequential modeling network for career embedding and extract latent talent factors from multiple networks, which are designed with different functions of handling related issues of the timing, companies, and positions for job-hopping. Then, we perform collaborative filtering for generating personalized predictions. Furthermore, we propose a temporal encoding mechanism to handle dynamic temporal information so that TACTP is capable of generating time-aware predictions by addressing the challenges for variable interval time sequence modeling. Finally, we have conducted extensive experiments on large-scale real-world data to evaluate TACTP against the state-of-the-art baselines, and the results show that TACTP has advantages over baselines on all targeted tasks for career trajectory prediction.

Vehicle mobility optimization in urban areas is a long-standing problem in smart city and spatial data analysis. Given the complex urban scenario and unpredictable social events, our work focuses on developing a mobile sequential recommendation system to maximize the profitability of vehicle service providers (e.g., taxi drivers). In particular, we treat the dynamic route optimization problem as a long-term sequential decision-making task. A reinforcement-learning framework is proposed to tackle this problem, by integrating a self-check mechanism and a deep neural network for customer pick-up point monitoring. To account for unexpected situations (e.g., the COVID-19 outbreak), our method is designed to be capable of handling related environment changes with a self-adaptive parameter determination mechanism. Based on the yellow taxi data in New York City and vicinity before and after the COVID-19 outbreak, we have conducted comprehensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our method. The results show consistently excellent performance, from hourly to weekly measures, to support the superiority of our method over the state-of-the-art methods (i.e., with more than 98% improvement in terms of the profitability for taxi drivers).

Partial correlation-based connectivity networks can describe the direct connectivity between features while avoiding spurious effects, and hence they can be implemented in diagnosing complex dynamic multivariate systems. However, existing studies mainly focus on single systems that are ill-equipped for incremental learning. Moreover, related methods estimate temporal connectivity network by imposing only sparse regularization without integrating pattern priors (e.g., inter-system shared pattern and intra-system intrinsic pattern), which have been proven effective in limiting noise interference. To this end, we develop an adaptive connectivity estimation model that incorporates prior patterns, namely Sparse Adaptive Meta-Learning Connectivity Network (SAMCN). Specifically, our model extends ideas of the gradient-based meta-learning to capture inter-system shared prior information by generating fast adaptive initialization parameters for the connectivity matrix. Then, a sparse variational autoencoder is proposed to generate a weight matrix for sparse regularization penalty in reweighted LASSO, which helps extract intra-system intrinsic patterns (local manifold structure). Experimental results on both synthetic data and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method is capable of adequately capturing the aforementioned pattern priors. Further, experiments from corresponding classification tasks validate the strength of the prior pattern-aware features connectivity network in resulting in better classification performance.

In this article, we address the multiple-choice machine comprehension (MC) problem in natural language processing. Existing approaches for MC are usually designed for general cases; however, we specially develop a novel method for solving the multiple-choice MC problem. We take the inspiration generative adversarial networks (GANs) and first propose an adversarial framework for multiple-choice oriented MC, named McGAN . Specifically, our approach is designed as a GAN-based method that unifies both generative and discriminative MC models. Working together, the generative model focuses on predicting relevant answer given a passage (text) and a question; the discriminative model focuses on predicting their relevancy given an answer-passage-question set. Based on the competition via adversarial training in a minimize-maximize game, the proposed method takes advantages from both models. To evaluate the performance, we test our McGAN model on three well-known datasets for multiple-choice MC. Our results show that McGAN can achieve a significant increase in accuracy compared to existing models based on all three datasets, and it consistently outperforms all tested baselines, including state-of-the-art techniques.

We enhance the mobile sequential recommendation (MSR) model and address some critical issues in existing formulations by proposing three new forms of the MSR from a multi-user perspective. The multi-user MSR (MMSR) model searches optimal routes for multiple drivers at different locations while disallowing overlapping routes to be recommended. To enrich the properties of pick-up points in the problem formulation, we additionally consider the pick-up capacity as an important feature, leading to the following two modified forms of the MMSR: MMSR-m and MMSR-d. The MMSR-m sets a maximum pick-up capacity for all urban areas, while the MMSR-d allows the pick-up capacity to vary at different locations. We develop a parallel framework based on the simulated annealing to numerically solve the MMSR problem series. Also, a push-point method is introduced to improve our algorithms further for the MMSR-m and the MMSR-d, which can handle the route optimization in more practical ways. Our results on both real-world and synthetic data confirmed the superiority of our problem formulation and solutions under more demanding practical scenarios over several published benchmarks.

The rapid development of the technologies for online learning provides students with extensive resources for self-learning and brings new opportunities for data-driven research on educational management. An important issue of online learning is to diagnose the knowledge proficiency (i.e., the mastery level of a certain knowledge concept) of each student. Considering that it is a common case that students inevitably learn and forget knowledge from time to time, it is necessary to track the change of their knowledge proficiency during the learning process. Existing approaches either relied on static scenarios or ignored the interpretability of diagnosis results. To address these problems, in this article, we present a focused study on diagnosing the knowledge proficiency of students, where the goal is to track and explain their evolutions simultaneously. Specifically, we first devise an explanatory probabilistic matrix factorization model, Knowledge Proficiency Tracing (KPT), by leveraging educational priors. KPT model first associates each exercise with a knowledge vector in which each element represents a specific knowledge concept with the help of Q -matrix. Correspondingly, at each time, each student can be represented as a proficiency vector in the same knowledge space. Then, our KPT model jointly applies two classical educational theories (i.e., learning curve and forgetting curve ) to capture the change of students’ proficiency level on concepts over time. Furthermore, for improving the predictive performance, we develop an improved version of KPT, named Exercise-correlated Knowledge Proficiency Tracing (EKPT), by considering the connectivity among exercises with the same knowledge concepts. Finally, we apply our KPT and EKPT models to three important diagnostic tasks, including knowledge estimation, score prediction, and diagnosis result visualization. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that both of our models could track the knowledge proficiency of students effectively and interpretatively.

We investigate the stochastic optimization problem and develop a scalable parallel computing algorithm for deep learning tasks. The key of our study involves a reformation of the objective function for the stochastic optimization in neural network models. We propose a novel update rule, named weighted aggregating stochastic gradient decent, after theoretically analyzing the characteristics of the newly formalized objective function. The new rule introduces a weighted aggregation scheme based on the performance of local workers and does not require a center variable. It assesses the relative importance of local workers and accepts them according to their contributions. Our new rule also allows the implementation of both synchronous and asynchronous parallelization and can result in varying convergence rates. For method evaluation, we benchmark our schemes against the mainstream algorithms, including the elastic averaging SGD in training deep neural networks for classification tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on several classic datasets, and the results confirm the strength of our scheme in accelerating the training of deep architecture and scalable parallelization.

In this paper, we develop an efficient parallel heuristic method to solve the global optimization problem associated with the ridesharing system. Based on the carefully formalized problem and objective function, we fully utilize the heuristic characteristics of the algorithm for handling the real-life constraints in ridesharing. Following the principles of simulated annealing, our method is adaptive in handling the matching and route optimization tasks. We develop an efficient parallel scheme with simulated annealing, named PCSA, for solving the global optimization problem for ridesharing. Our algorithm is capable of efficiently addressing the potential of ridesharing by exploiting the mobility information of the ride requests. Based on extensive experiments on large real-world data, we validate the performance of our parallel heuristic algorithm. Our results confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method and its superiority over all other benchmarks.

The understanding of job mobility can benefit talent management operations in a number of ways, such as talent recruitment, talent development, and talent retention. While there is extensive literature showing the predictability of the organization-level job mobility patterns (e.g., in terms of the employee turnover rate), there are no effective solutions for supporting the understanding of job mobility at an individual level. To this end, in this paper, we propose a hierarchical career-path-aware neural network for learning individual-level job mobility. Specifically, we aim at answering two questions related to individuals in their career paths: 1) who will be the next employer? 2) how long will the individual work in the new position? Specifically, our model exploits a hierarchical neural network structure with embedded attention mechanism for characterizing the internal and external job mobility. Also, it takes personal profile information into consideration in the learning process. Finally, the extensive results on real-world data show that the proposed model can lead to significant improvements in prediction accuracy for the two aforementioned prediction problems. Moreover, we show that the above two questions are well addressed by our model with a certain level of interpretability. For the case studies, we provide data-driven evidence showing interesting patterns associated with various factors (e.g., job duration, firm type, etc.) in the job mobility prediction process.

We present a novel method named Latent Semantic Imputation (LSI) to transfer external knowledge into semantic space for enhancing word embedding. The method integrates graph theory to extract the latent manifold structure of the entities in the affinity space and leverages non-negative least squares with standard simplex constraints and power iteration method to derive spectral embeddings. It provides an effective and efficient approach to combining entity representations defined in different Euclidean spaces. Specifically, our approach generates and imputes reliable embedding vectors for low-frequency words in the semantic space and benefits downstream language tasks that depend on word embedding. We conduct comprehensive experiments on a carefully designed classification problem and language modeling and demonstrate the superiority of the enhanced embedding via LSI over several well-known benchmark embeddings. We also confirm the consistency of the results under different parameter settings of our method.

We speed up the solution of the mobile sequential recommendation (MSR) problem that requires searching optimal routes for empty taxi cabs through mining massive taxi GPS data. We develop new methods that combine parallel computing and the simulated annealing with novel global and local searches. While existing approaches usually involve costly offline algorithms and methodical pruning of the search space, our new methods provide direct real-time search for the optimal route without the offline preprocessing. Our methods significantly reduce computational time for the high dimensional MSR problems from days to seconds based on the real-world data as well as the synthetic ones. We efficiently provide solutions to MSR problems with thousands of pick-up points without offline training, compared to the published record of 25 pick-up points.

As a vital process to the success of an organization, salary benchmarking aims at identifying the right market rate for each job position. Traditional approaches for salary benchmarking heavily rely on the experiences from domain experts and limited market survey data, which have difficulties in handling the dynamic scenarios with the timely benchmarking requirement. To this end, in this paper, we propose a data-driven approach for intelligent salary benchmarking based on large-scale fine-grained online recruitment data. Specifically, we first construct a salary matrix based on the large-scale recruitment data and creatively formalize the salary benchmarking problem as a matrix completion task. Along this line, we develop a Holistic Salary Benchmarking Matrix Factorization (HSBMF) model for predicting the missing salary information in the salary matrix. Indeed, by integrating multiple confounding factors, such as company similarity, job similarity, and spatial-temporal similarity, HSBMF is able to provide a holistic and dynamic view for fine-grained salary benchmarking. Finally, extensive experiments on large-scale real-world data clearly validate the effectiveness of our approach for job salary benchmarking.

A theory is developed to unify the original form, and its many variations, of the mobile sequential recommendation (MSR) problem. The unified theory, expressing the same MSR problem, is superior to the original form in many aspects including a more standardized form. In addition to a newly proposed expected traveling time (ETT) function to measure the quality of recommended routes, we introduce five additional improvements. Also, three essential mathematical properties of the new objective function enable the development of the methods to solve realistic MSR problems with complex conditions. The MSR solutions also support the discovered properties of the proposed objective function. The unified theory should support the long-term decision making for drivers and the traffic department in general.

Following the recent advances of artificial intelligence, financial text mining has gained new potential to benefit theoretical research with practice impacts. An essential research question for financial text mining is how to accurately identify the actual financial opinions (e.g., bullish or bearish) behind words in plain text. Traditional methods mainly consider this task as a text classification problem with solutions based on machine learning algorithms. However, most of them rely heavily on the hand-crafted features extracted from the text. Indeed, a critical issue along this line is that the latent global and local contexts of the financial opinions usually cannot be fully captured. To this end, we propose a context-aware deep embedding network for financial text mining, named CADEN, by jointly encoding the global and local contextual information. Especially, we capture and include an attitude-aware user embedding to enhance the performance of our model. We validate our method with extensive experiments based on a real-world dataset and several state-of-the-art baselines for investor sentiment recognition. Our results show a consistently superior performance of our approach for identifying the financial opinions from texts of different formats.

The classic mobile sequential recommendation (MSR) problem aims to provide the optimal route to taxi drivers for minimizing the potential travel distance before they meet next passengers. However, the problem is designed from the view of a single user and may lead to overlapped recommendations and cause traffic problems. Existing approaches usually contain an offline pruning process with extremely high computational cost, given a large number of pick-up points. To this end, we formalize a new multi-user MSR (MMSR) problem that locates optimal routes for a group of drivers with different starting positions. We develop two efficient methods, PSAD and PSAD-M, for solving the MMSR problem by ganging parallel computing and simulated annealing. Our methods outperform several existing approaches, especially for high-dimensional MMSR problems, with a record-breaking performance of 180x speedup using 384 cores.

Given a large transactional database, correlation computing/association analysis aims at efficiently finding strongly correlated items. For traditional association analysis, relationships among variables are usually measured at a global level. In this study, we investigate confounding factors that can help to capture abnormal correlation behaviors at a local level. Indeed, many real-world phenomena are localized to specific markets or subpopulations. Such local relationships may not be visible or may be miscalculated when collectively analyzing the entire data. In particular, confounding effects that change the direction of correlation are a most severe problem because the global correlations alone leads to errant conclusions. To this end, we propose CONFOUND, an efficient algorithm to identify paradoxical correlation patterns (i.e., where controlling for a third item changes the direction of association for strongly correlated pairs) using effective pruning strategies. Moreover, we also provide an enhanced version of this algorithm, called CONFOUND±, which substantially speeds up the confounder search step. Finally, experimental results showed that our proposed CONFOUND and CONFOUND± algorithms can effectively identify confounders and the computational performance is orders of magnitude faster than benchmark methods.

Advances in real-time location systems have enabled us to collect massive amounts of fine-grained semantically rich location traces, which provide unparalleled opportunities for understanding human activities and generating useful knowledge. This, in turn, delivers intelligence for real-time decision making in various fields, such as workflow management. Indeed, it is a new paradigm to model workflows through knowledge discovery in location traces. To that end, in this paper, we provide a focused study of workflow modeling by integrated analysis of indoor location traces in the hospital environment. In particular, we develop a workflow modeling framework that automatically constructs the workflow states and estimates the parameters describing the workflow transition patterns. More specifically, we propose effective and efficient regularizations for modeling the indoor location traces as stochastic processes. First, to improve the interpretability of the workflow states, we use the geography relationship between the indoor rooms to define a prior of the workflow state distribution. This prior encourages each workflow state to be a contiguous region in the building. Second, to further improve the modeling performance, we show how to use the correlation between related types of medical devices to reinforce the parameter estimation for multiple workflow models. In comparison with our preliminary work [11], we not only develop an integrated workflow modeling framework applicable to general indoor environments, but also improve the modeling accuracy significantly. We reduce the average log-loss by up to 11 percent.

Many recent studies on finance and social networks discovered that investor's attention is correlated to the financial market movement in terms of the price shocks. Following related findings, a significant and challenging problem is to forecast the direction of the market movement based on vast social media activities. Appropriately processing social networks data and developing models to capture investor's attention on stocks would effectively help financial forecasting. In this paper, we propose and then apply a price shocks forecasting framework, which simultaneously takes the influence of social network users and their opinions about stocks into consideration. Specifically, we develop a new method to estimate social attention to stocks by influence modeling and sentiment analysis. Then, we use it in price shocks forecasting, which we formalize as a classification problem. We also consider the effect of historical market information on the market movement. Finally, we evaluate our framework based on a series of tests on the Chinese stock data. Our results show that the newly proposed measurement of social attention effectively improves the forecasting power of our framework.

With the rapid growth of usage of social network, the patterns, the scales, and the rate of information exchange have brought profound impacts on research and practice in finance. One important topic is the stock market efficiency analysis. Traditional schemes in finance focus on identifying significant abnormal returns triggered by important events. However, those events are merely identified by regular financial announcements such as mergers, equity issuances, and financial reports. Related data-driven approaches mainly focus on developing trading strategies using social media data, while the results are usually lack of theoretical explanations. In this paper, we fill the gap between the usage of social media data and financial theories. We propose a Degree of Social Attention (DSA) framework for stock analysis based on influence propagation model. Specifically, we define the self-influence for users in a social network and the DSA for stocks. A recursive process is also designed for dynamic value updating. Furthermore, we provide two modified approaches to reduce the computational cost. Our testing results from the Chinese stock market suggest that the proposed framework effectively captures stock abnormal returns based on the related social media data, and DSA is verified to be a key factor to link social media activities to the stock market.

Advances in real-time location system (RTLS) solutions have enabled us to collect massive amounts of fine-grained semantically rich location traces, which provide unparalleled opportunities for understanding human activities and discovering useful knowledge. This, in turn, delivers intelligence for real-time decision making in various fields, such as workflow management. Indeed, it is a new paradigm for workflow modeling by the knowledge discovery in location traces. To that end, in this paper, we provide a focused study of workflow modeling by the integrated analysis of indoor location traces in the hospital environment. In comparison with conventional workflow modeling based on passive workflow logs, one salient feature of our approach is that it can proactively unravel the workflow patterns hidden in the location traces, by automatically constructing the workflow states and estimating parameters describing the transition patterns of moving objects. Specifically, to determine a meaningful granularity for the model, the workflow states are first constructed as regions associated with specific healthcare activities. Then, we transform the original indoor location traces to the sequences of workflow states and model the workflow transition patterns by finite state machines. Furthermore, we leverage the correlations in the location traces between related types of medical devices to reinforce the modeling performance and enable more applications. The results show that the proposed framework can not only model the workflow patterns effectively, but also have managerial applications in workflow monitoring, auditing, and inspection of workflow compliance, which are critical in the healthcare industry.

The increasing availability of large-scale location traces creates unprecedent opportunities to change the paradigm for knowledge discovery in transportation systems. A particularly promising area is to extract energy-efficient transportation patterns (green knowledge), which can be used as guidance for reducing inefficiencies in energy consumption of transportation sectors. However, extracting green knowledge from location traces is not a trivial task. Conventional data analysis tools are usually not customized for handling the massive quantity, complex, dynamic, and distributed nature of location traces. To that end, in this paper, we provide a focused study of extracting energy-efficient transportation patterns from location traces. Specifically, we have the initial focus on a sequence of mobile recommendations. As a case study, we develop a mobile recommender system which has the ability in recommending a sequence of pick-up points for taxi drivers or a sequence of potential parking positions. The goal of this mobile recommendation system is to maximize the probability of business success. Along this line, we provide a Potential Travel Distance (PTD) function for evaluating each candidate sequence. This PTD function possesses a monotone property which can be used to effectively prune the search space. Based on this PTD function, we develop two algorithms, LCP and SkyRoute, for finding the recommended routes. Finally, experimental results show that the proposed system can provide effective mobile sequential recommendation and the knowledge extracted from location traces can be used for coaching drivers and leading to the efficient use of energy.

The performance of a depth-first frequent itemset (FI) miming algorithm is closely related to the total number of recursions. In previous approaches this is mainly decided by the total number of FIs, which results in poor performance when a large number of FIs are involved. To solve this problem, a three-strategy adaptive algorithm, bitmap itemset support counting (BISC), is presented. The core strategy, BISC1, is used in the innermost steps of the recursion. For a database D with only s frequent items, a depth-first approach need up to s levels of recursions to detect all the FIs (up to 2 s ). BISC1 completely replaces these recursions with a special summation that directly calculates the supports of all the possible 2 s candidate itemsets. With BISC1 the run-time is entirely independent of the database after one database scan, and the per-candidate cost is only s . To offset the exponential growth of cost (both time and space) with BISC1 as s increases, a second strategy, BISC2, is introduced to effectively double the acceptable range of s . BISC2 divides an itemset into prefix and suffix and improves the performance by pruning all the itemsets with infrequent prefixes. If the total number of frequent items in D is high, the classic database projection strategy is used. In this case for the first s items a single run of BISC (1 or 2) is applied. For each of the remaining items, a projected database is created and the mining process proceeds recursively. To achieve optimal performance, BISC adaptively decides which strategy to use based on the dataset and minimum support. Experiments show that BISC outperforms previous approaches in all the datasets tested. Even though this does not guarantee that BISC will always perform the best, the result is impressive given the fact that most existing algorithms are only efficient in some types of datasets. The memory usage of BISC is also comparable to those of other algorithms.