Latent user representations are widely adopted in the tech industry for powering personalized recommender systems. Most prior work infers a single high dimensional embedding to represent a user, which is a good starting point but falls short in delivering a full understanding of the user's interests. In this work, we introduce PinnerSage, an end-to-end recommender system that represents each user via multi-modal embeddings and leverages this rich representation of users to provides high quality personalized recommendations. PinnerSage achieves this by clustering users' actions into conceptually coherent clusters with the help of a hierarchical clustering method (Ward) and summarizes the clusters via representative pins (Medoids) for efficiency and interpretability. PinnerSage is deployed in production at Pinterest and we outline the several design decisions that makes it run seamlessly at a very large scale. We conduct several offline and online A/B experiments to show that our method significantly outperforms single embedding methods.

Emerging cross-device artificial intelligence (AI) applications require a transition from conventional centralized learning systems towards large-scale distributed AI systems that can collaboratively perform complex learning tasks. In this regard, democratized learning (Dem-AI) (Minh et al. 2020) lays out a holistic philosophy with underlying principles for building large-scale distributed and democratized machine learning systems. The outlined principles are meant to provide a generalization of distributed learning that goes beyond existing mechanisms such as federated learning. Inspired from this philosophy, a novel distributed learning approach is proposed in this paper. The approach consists of a self-organizing hierarchical structuring mechanism based on agglomerative clustering, hierarchical generalization, and corresponding learning mechanism. Subsequently, a hierarchical generalized learning problem in a recursive form is formulated and shown to be approximately solved using the solutions of distributed personalized learning problems and hierarchical generalized averaging mechanism. To that end, a distributed learning algorithm, namely DemLearn and its variant, DemLearn-P is proposed. Extensive experiments on benchmark MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets show that proposed algorithms demonstrate better results in the generalization performance of learning model at agents compared to the conventional FL algorithms. Detailed analysis provides useful configurations to further tune up both the generalization and specialization performance of the learning models in Dem-AI systems.

Anomaly detection has been an active research area for several decades, with early exploration dating back as far as to 1960s [52]. Due to the increasing demand and applications in broad domains, such as risk management, compliance, security, financial surveillance, health and medical risk, and AI safety, anomaly detection plays increasingly important roles, highlighted in various communities including data mining, machine learning, computer vision and statistics. In recent years, deep learning has shown tremendous capabilities in learning expressive representations of complex data such as high-dimensional data, temporal data, spatial data and graph data, pushing the boundaries of different learning tasks.

Network embedding is an influential graph mining technique for representing nodes in a graph as distributed vectors. However, the majority of network embedding methods focus on learning a single vector representation for each node, which has been recently criticized for not being capable of modeling multiple aspects of a node. To capture the multiple aspects of each node, existing studies mainly rely on offline graph clustering performed prior to the actual embedding, which results in the cluster membership of each node (i.e., node aspect distribution) fixed throughout training of the embedding model. We argue that this not only makes each node always have the same aspect distribution regardless of its dynamic context, but also hinders the end-to-end training of the model that eventually leads to the final embedding quality largely dependent on the clustering. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end framework for multi-aspect network embedding, called asp2vec, in which the aspects of each node are dynamically assigned based on its local context. More precisely, among multiple aspects, we dynamically assign a single aspect to each node based on its current context, and our aspect selection module is end-to-end differentiable via the Gumbel-Softmax trick. We also introduce the aspect regularization framework to capture the interactions among the multiple aspects in terms of relatedness and diversity. We further demonstrate that our proposed framework can be readily extended to heterogeneous networks. Extensive experiments towards various downstream tasks on various types of homogeneous networks and a heterogeneous network demonstrate the superiority of asp2vec.

Hello guys, you may know that Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence have become more and more important in this increasingly digital world. They are now providing a competitive edge to businesses like NetFlix's Movie recommendations. If you have just started in this field and looking for what to learn then I am going to share 5 essential Machine learning algorithms you can learn as a beginner. These essential algorithms form the basis of most common Machine learning projects and having a good knowledge of them will not only help you to understand the project and model quickly but also to change them as per your need. Machine learning by a simple word is the science or the field of making the computer learn like a human by feeding it with the data and without being programmed and it separate into two categories the first one is classification problems which the machine needs to classify between two objects or more like between human and animal and the second is regression problems which the machine need to produce an output based on a previous data.

Clustering: Any enterprise needs to concentrate on knowing clients: who are they, and what affects their buying decisions? Clustering algorithms will move through the data and will try to find such existing clusters. You can also increase the number of clusters in your algorithm which will help to you to adjust the granularity of these groups. Unsupervised Machine Learning: What is, Algorithms, Example and its Application. It's the year 2030, and you have a bustling day planned.

This study presents a semi-nonparametric Latent Class Choice Model (LCCM) with a flexible class membership component. The proposed model formulates the latent classes using mixture models as an alternative approach to the traditional random utility specification with the aim of comparing the two approaches on various measures including prediction accuracy and representation of heterogeneity in the choice process. Mixture models are parametric model-based clustering techniques that have been widely used in areas such as machine learning, data mining and patter recognition for clustering and classification problems. An Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is derived for the estimation of the proposed model. Using two different case studies on travel mode choice behavior, the proposed model is compared to traditional discrete choice models on the basis of parameter estimates' signs, value of time, statistical goodness-of-fit measures, and cross-validation tests. Results show that mixture models improve the overall performance of latent class choice models by providing better out-of-sample prediction accuracy in addition to better representations of heterogeneity without weakening the behavioral and economic interpretability of the choice models.

Clustering can be used to extract insights from data or to verify some of the assumptions held by the domain experts, namely data segmentation. In the literature, few methods can be applied in clustering qualitative values using the context associated with other variables present in the data, without losing interpretability. Moreover, the metrics for calculating dissimilarity between qualitative values often scale poorly for high dimensional mixed datasets. In this study, we propose a novel method for clustering qualitative values, based on Hierarchical Clustering (HQC), and using Maximum Mean Discrepancy. HQC maintains the original interpretability of the qualitative information present in the dataset. We apply HQC to two datasets. Using a mixed dataset provided by Spotify, we showcase how our method can be used for clustering music artists based on the quantitative features of thousands of songs. In addition, using financial features of companies, we cluster company industries, and discuss the implications in investment portfolios diversification.

Allowing humans to communicate through natural language with robots requires connections between words and percepts. The process of creating these connections is called symbol grounding and has been studied for nearly three decades. Although many studies have been conducted, not many considered grounding of synonyms and the employed algorithms either work only offline or in a supervised manner. In this paper, a cross-situational learning based grounding framework is proposed that allows grounding of words and phrases through corresponding percepts without human supervision and online, i.e. it does not require any explicit training phase, but instead updates the obtained mappings for every new encountered situation. The proposed framework is evaluated through an interaction experiment between a human tutor and a robot, and compared to an existing unsupervised grounding framework. The results show that the proposed framework is able to ground words through their corresponding percepts online and in an unsupervised manner, while outperforming the baseline framework.

Compared to (simple) clustering data into K clusters, hierarchical clustering is much more complex and much less understood. One of the few seminal advances in hierarchical clusterings is the introduction by Dasgupta (2016) of a general yet simple paradigm of hierarchical clustering as loss minimization. This paradigm was expanded by Charikar and Chatziafratis (2016) and Roy and Pokutta (2016). The latter work also introduces a new set of techniques for obtaining hierarchical clusterings by showing that optimizing the loss can be relaxed to a Linear Program (LP). This paper introduces the first method to obtain optimality guarantees in the context of hierarchical clustering. Specifically, it is shown that the Sublevel Set (SS) paradigm invented by Meila (2018) for simple, nonhiearchical clustering, can be extended as well to hierarchical clustering. The main contribution is show that there is a natural distance between hierarchical clusterings whose properties can be exploited in the setting of the SS problem we will present in Section 3. The Sublevel Set method produces stability theorems of the following form.