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Explainability of Highly Associated Fuzzy Churn Patterns in Binary Classification

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Customer churn, particularly in the telecommunications sector, influences both costs and profits. As the explainability of models becomes increasingly important, this study emphasizes not only the explainability of customer churn through machine learning models, but also the importance of identifying multivariate patterns and setting soft bounds for intuitive interpretation. The main objective is to use a machine learning model and fuzzy-set theory with top-\textit{k} HUIM to identify highly associated patterns of customer churn with intuitive identification, referred to as Highly Associated Fuzzy Churn Patterns (HAFCP). Moreover, this method aids in uncovering association rules among multiple features across low, medium, and high distributions. Such discoveries are instrumental in enhancing the explainability of findings. Experiments show that when the top-5 HAFCPs are included in five datasets, a mixture of performance results is observed, with some showing notable improvements. It becomes clear that high importance features enhance explanatory power through their distribution and patterns associated with other features. As a result, the study introduces an innovative approach that improves the explainability and effectiveness of customer churn prediction models.


FoMo: A Foundation Model for Mobile Traffic Forecasting with Diffusion Model

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Mobile traffic forecasting allows operators to anticipate network dynamics and performance in advance, offering substantial potential for enhancing service quality and improving user experience. However, existing models are often task-oriented and are trained with tailored data, which limits their effectiveness in diverse mobile network tasks of Base Station (BS) deployment, resource allocation, energy optimization, etc. and hinders generalization across different urban environments. Foundation models have made remarkable strides across various domains of NLP and CV due to their multi-tasking adaption and zero/few-shot learning capabilities. In this paper, we propose an innovative Foundation model for Mo}bile traffic forecasting (FoMo), aiming to handle diverse forecasting tasks of short/long-term predictions and distribution generation across multiple cities to support network planning and optimization. FoMo combines diffusion models and transformers, where various spatio-temporal masks are proposed to enable FoMo to learn intrinsic features of different tasks, and a contrastive learning strategy is developed to capture the correlations between mobile traffic and urban contexts, thereby improving its transfer learning capability. Extensive experiments on 9 real-world datasets demonstrate that FoMo outperforms current models concerning diverse forecasting tasks and zero/few-shot learning, showcasing a strong universality. We further deploy the FoMo on the JiuTian optimization platform of China Mobile, where we use the predicted mobile data to formulate network planning and optimization applications, including BS deployment, resource block scheduling, and BS sleep control.


A Comprehensive Evaluation of Cognitive Biases in LLMs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We present a large-scale evaluation of 30 cognitive biases in 20 state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) under various decision-making scenarios. Our contributions include a novel general-purpose test framework for reliable and large-scale generation of tests for LLMs, a benchmark dataset with 30,000 tests for detecting cognitive biases in LLMs, and a comprehensive assessment of the biases found in the 20 evaluated LLMs. Our work confirms and broadens previous findings suggesting the presence of cognitive Figure 1: An LLM changes its answer as the framing of biases in LLMs by reporting evidence of all the decision changes, indicating the susceptibility of the 30 tested biases in at least some of the 20 LLM to the Framing Effect.


Learning to Control the Smoothness of Graph Convolutional Network Features

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The pioneering work of Oono and Suzuki [ICLR, 2020] and Cai and Wang [arXiv:2006.13318] initializes the analysis of the smoothness of graph convolutional network (GCN) features. Their results reveal an intricate empirical correlation between node classification accuracy and the ratio of smooth to non-smooth feature components. However, the optimal ratio that favors node classification is unknown, and the non-smooth features of deep GCN with ReLU or leaky ReLU activation function diminish. In this paper, we propose a new strategy to let GCN learn node features with a desired smoothness -- adapting to data and tasks -- to enhance node classification. Our approach has three key steps: (1) We establish a geometric relationship between the input and output of ReLU or leaky ReLU. (2) Building on our geometric insights, we augment the message-passing process of graph convolutional layers (GCLs) with a learnable term to modulate the smoothness of node features with computational efficiency. (3) We investigate the achievable ratio between smooth and non-smooth feature components for GCNs with the augmented message-passing scheme. Our extensive numerical results show that the augmented message-passing schemes significantly improve node classification for GCN and some related models.


Automating IETF Insights generation with AI

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper presents the IETF Insights project, an automated system that streamlines the generation of comprehensive reports on the activities of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Working Groups. The system collects, consolidates, and analyzes data from various IETF sources, including meeting minutes, participant lists, drafts and agendas. The core components of the system include data preprocessing code and a report generation module that produces high-quality documents in LaTeX or Markdown. By integrating large Language Models (LLMs) for summaries based on the data as ground truth, the IETF Insights project enhances the accessibility and utility of IETF records, providing a valuable overview of the IETF's activities and contributions to the community.


Spectrum Sharing using Deep Reinforcement Learning in Vehicular Networks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As the number of devices getting connected to the vehicular network grows exponentially, addressing the numerous challenges of effectively allocating spectrum in dynamic vehicular environment becomes increasingly difficult. Traditional methods may not suffice to tackle this issue. In vehicular networks safety critical messages are involved and it is important to implement an efficient spectrum allocation paradigm for hassle free communication as well as manage the congestion in the network. To tackle this, a Deep Q Network (DQN) model is proposed as a solution, leveraging its ability to learn optimal strategies over time and make decisions. The paper presents a few results and analyses, demonstrating the efficacy of the DQN model in enhancing spectrum sharing efficiency. Deep Reinforcement Learning methods for sharing spectrum in vehicular networks have shown promising outcomes, demonstrating the system's ability to adjust to dynamic communication environments. Both SARL and MARL models have exhibited successful rates of V2V communication, with the cumulative reward of the RL model reaching its maximum as training progresses.


Multi-modal Data based Semi-Supervised Learning for Vehicle Positioning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this paper, a multi-modal data based semi-supervised learning (SSL) framework that jointly use channel state information (CSI) data and RGB images for vehicle positioning is designed. In particular, an outdoor positioning system where the vehicle locations are determined by a base station (BS) is considered. The BS equipped with several cameras can collect a large amount of unlabeled CSI data and a small number of labeled CSI data of vehicles, and the images taken by cameras. Although the collected images contain partial information of vehicles (i.e. azimuth angles of vehicles), the relationship between the unlabeled CSI data and its azimuth angle, and the distances between the BS and the vehicles captured by images are both unknown. Therefore, the images cannot be directly used as the labels of unlabeled CSI data to train a positioning model. To exploit unlabeled CSI data and images, a SSL framework that consists of a pretraining stage and a downstream training stage is proposed. In the pretraining stage, the azimuth angles obtained from the images are considered as the labels of unlabeled CSI data to pretrain the positioning model. In the downstream training stage, a small sized labeled dataset in which the accurate vehicle positions are considered as labels is used to retrain the model. Simulation results show that the proposed method can reduce the positioning error by up to 30% compared to a baseline where the model is not pretrained.


Data-Driven Cellular Network Selector for Vehicle Teleoperations

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Remote control of robotic systems, also known as teleoperation, is crucial for the development of autonomous vehicle (AV) technology. It allows a remote operator to view live video from AVs and, in some cases, to make real-time decisions. The effectiveness of video-based teleoperation systems is heavily influenced by the quality of the cellular network and, in particular, its packet loss rate and latency. To optimize these parameters, an AV can be connected to multiple cellular networks and determine in real time over which cellular network each video packet will be transmitted. We present an algorithm, called Active Network Selector (ANS), which uses a time series machine learning approach for solving this problem. We compare ANS to a baseline non-learning algorithm, which is used today in commercial systems, and show that ANS performs much better, with respect to both packet loss and packet latency.


The Hottest Startups in Paris in 2024

WIRED

In the past two years the French capital has been in the throes of AI fever and has launched some of Europe's most talked-about startups, including Mistral, which is currently valued at 6.2 billion ( 4.7 billion). That's partly down to the support the industry has received. President Emmanuel Macron has given French AI startups some emphatic political backing, while telecoms billionaire Xavier Niel has provided much investment and will to finance national ambition. In September 2023, Niel invested 200 million ( 212 million), splitting that money between funding for startups such as Mistral, an AI research lab called Kyutai and a cloud supercomputer powered by Nvidia. "I'm the old guy who likes entrepreneurs and the idea was always the same: how we can help this talent to stay here, creating companies," says Niel. Niel, a prolific French businessman who owns telecommunications company Iliad, believes European AI companies now have a unique opportunity to act. "If you want to create a search engine now from scratch, you cannot win because you weren't there 25 years ago.


Deep Learning-driven Mobile Traffic Measurement Collection and Analysis

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Modelling dynamic traffic patterns and especially the continuously changing dependencies between different base stations, which previous studies overlook, is challenging. Traditional algorithms struggle to process large volumes of data and to extract deep insights that help elucidate mobile traffic demands with fine granularity, as well as how these demands will evolve in the future. Therefore, in this thesis we harness the powerful hierarchical feature learning abilities of Deep Learning (DL) techniques in both spatial and temporal domains and develop solutions for precise city-scale mobile traffic analysis and forecasting. Firstly, we design Spider, a mobile traffic measurement collection and reconstruction framework with a view to reducing the cost of measurement collection and inferring traffic consumption with high accuracy, despite working with sparse information. In particular, we train a reinforcement learning agent to selectively sample subsets of target mobile coverage areas and tackle the large action space problem specific to this setting. We then introduce a lightweight neural network model to reconstruct the traffic consumption based on historical sparse measurements. Our proposed framework outperforms existing solutions on a real-world mobile traffic dataset. Secondly, we design SDGNet, a handover-aware graph neural network model for long-term mobile traffic forecasting. We model the cellular network as a graph, and leverage handover frequency to capture the dependencies between base stations across time. Handover information reflects user mobility such as daily commute, which helps in increasing the accuracy of the forecasts made. We proposed dynamic graph convolution to extract features from both traffic consumption and handover data, showing that our model outperforms other benchmark graph models on a mobile traffic dataset collected by a major network operator.