Statistical Learning
Label Information Enhanced Fraud Detection against Low Homophily in Graphs
Wang, Yuchen, Zhang, Jinghui, Huang, Zhengjie, Li, Weibin, Feng, Shikun, Ma, Ziheng, Sun, Yu, Yu, Dianhai, Dong, Fang, Jin, Jiahui, Wang, Beilun, Luo, Junzhou
Node classification is a substantial problem in graph-based fraud detection. Many existing works adopt Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to enhance fraud detectors. While promising, currently most GNN-based fraud detectors fail to generalize to the low homophily setting. Besides, label utilization has been proved to be significant factor for node classification problem. But we find they are less effective in fraud detection tasks due to the low homophily in graphs. In this work, we propose GAGA, a novel Group AGgregation enhanced TrAnsformer, to tackle the above challenges. Specifically, the group aggregation provides a portable method to cope with the low homophily issue. Such an aggregation explicitly integrates the label information to generate distinguishable neighborhood information. Along with group aggregation, an attempt towards end-to-end trainable group encoding is proposed which augments the original feature space with the class labels. Meanwhile, we devise two additional learnable encodings to recognize the structural and relational context. Then, we combine the group aggregation and the learnable encodings into a Transformer encoder to capture the semantic information. Experimental results clearly show that GAGA outperforms other competitive graph-based fraud detectors by up to 24.39% on two trending public datasets and a real-world industrial dataset from Anonymous. Even more, the group aggregation is demonstrated to outperform other label utilization methods (e.g., C&S, BoT/UniMP) in the low homophily setting.
Robust Fair Clustering: A Novel Fairness Attack and Defense Framework
Chhabra, Anshuman, Li, Peizhao, Mohapatra, Prasant, Liu, Hongfu
Clustering algorithms are widely used in many societal resource allocation applications, such as loan approvals and candidate recruitment, among others, and hence, biased or unfair model outputs can adversely impact individuals that rely on these applications. To this end, many fair clustering approaches have been recently proposed to counteract this issue. Due to the potential for significant harm, it is essential to ensure that fair clustering algorithms provide consistently fair outputs even under adversarial influence. However, fair clustering algorithms have not been studied from an adversarial attack perspective. In contrast to previous research, we seek to bridge this gap and conduct a robustness analysis against fair clustering by proposing a novel black-box fairness attack. Through comprehensive experiments, we find that state-of-the-art models are highly susceptible to our attack as it can reduce their fairness performance significantly. Finally, we propose Consensus Fair Clustering (CFC), the first robust fair clustering approach that transforms consensus clustering into a fair graph partitioning problem, and iteratively learns to generate fair cluster outputs. Experimentally, we observe that CFC is highly robust to the proposed attack and is thus a truly robust fair clustering alternative.
Mean Parity Fair Regression in RKHS
Wei, Shaokui, Liu, Jiayin, Li, Bing, Zha, Hongyuan
We study the fair regression problem under the notion of Mean Parity (MP) fairness, which requires the conditional mean of the learned function output to be constant with respect to the sensitive attributes. We address this problem by leveraging reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) to construct the functional space whose members are guaranteed to satisfy the fairness constraints. The proposed functional space suggests a closed-form solution for the fair regression problem that is naturally compatible with multiple sensitive attributes. Furthermore, by formulating the fairness-accuracy tradeoff as a relaxed fair regression problem, we derive a corresponding regression function that can be implemented efficiently and provides interpretable tradeoffs. More importantly, under some mild assumptions, the proposed method can be applied to regression problems with a covariance-based notion of fairness. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show the proposed methods achieve competitive and even superior performance compared with several state-of-the-art methods.
Mental Health Coping Stories on Social Media: A Causal-Inference Study of Papageno Effect
Yuan, Yunhao, Saha, Koustuv, Keller, Barbara, Isometsä, Erkki Tapio, Aledavood, Talayeh
A considerable amount of literature [16, 25, 49] has studied The Papageno effect concerns how media can play a positive role and re-confirmed the harmful effect of media, dubbed the "Werther in preventing and mitigating suicidal ideation and behaviors. With effect" [38], describing a spike in suicides after a heavily publicized the increasing ubiquity and widespread use of social media, individuals suicide. However, there is much less research about the beneficial often express and share lived experiences and struggles effects of media, referred to as the "Papageno effect", describing a decrease with mental health. However, there is a gap in our understanding in suicides after reporting alternatives to suicide. Niederkrotenthaler about the existence and effectiveness of the Papageno effect in social et al. explored the possible protective effect of media media, which we study in this paper. In particular, we adopt a reporting about suicide [34]. This study finds a decrease in suicides, causal-inference framework to examine the impact of exposure to if reports of suicide related content portray ways of overcoming mental health coping stories on individuals on Twitter. We obtain suicidal ideation without narrating suicidal behaviors.
Quantum Machine Learning hyperparameter search
Consul-Pacareu, S., Montaño, R., Rodriguez-Fernandez, Kevin, Corretgé, Àlex, Vilella-Moreno, Esteve, Casado-Faulí, Daniel, Atchade-Adelomou, Parfait
This paper presents a quantum-based Fourier-regression approach for machine learning hyperparameter optimization applied to a benchmark of models trained on a dataset related to a forecast problem in the airline industry. Our approach utilizes the Fourier series method to represent the hyperparameter search space, which is then optimized using quantum algorithms to find the optimal set of hyperparameters for a given machine learning model. Our study evaluates the proposed method on a benchmark of models trained to predict a forecast problem in the airline industry using a standard HyperParameter Optimizer (HPO). The results show that our approach outperforms traditional hyperparameter optimization methods in terms of accuracy and convergence speed for the given search space. Our study provides a new direction for future research in quantum-based machine learning hyperparameter optimization.
Stability-based Generalization Analysis for Mixtures of Pointwise and Pairwise Learning
Wang, Jiahuan, Chen, Jun, Chen, Hong, Gu, Bin, Li, Weifu, Tang, Xin
Recently, some mixture algorithms of pointwise and pairwise learning (PPL) have been formulated by employing the hybrid error metric of "pointwise loss + pairwise loss" and have shown empirical effectiveness on feature selection, ranking and recommendation tasks. However, to the best of our knowledge, the learning theory foundation of PPL has not been touched in the existing works. In this paper, we try to fill this theoretical gap by investigating the generalization properties of PPL. After extending the definitions of algorithmic stability to the PPL setting, we establish the high-probability generalization bounds for uniformly stable PPL algorithms. Moreover, explicit convergence rates of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and regularized risk minimization (RRM) for PPL are stated by developing the stability analysis technique of pairwise learning. In addition, the refined generalization bounds of PPL are obtained by replacing uniform stability with on-average stability.
Average-case Acceleration Through Spectral Density Estimation
Pedregosa, Fabian, Scieur, Damien
We develop a framework for the average-case analysis of random quadratic problems and derive algorithms that are optimal under this analysis. This yields a new class of methods that achieve acceleration given a model of the Hessian's eigenvalue distribution. We develop explicit algorithms for the uniform, Marchenko-Pastur, and exponential distributions. These methods are momentum-based algorithms, whose hyper-parameters can be estimated without knowledge of the Hessian's smallest singular value, in contrast with classical accelerated methods like Nesterov acceleration and Polyak momentum. Through empirical benchmarks on quadratic and logistic regression problems, we identify regimes in which the the proposed methods improve over classical (worst-case) accelerated methods.
AutoAC: Towards Automated Attribute Completion for Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network
Zhu, Guanghui, Zhu, Zhennan, Wang, Wenjie, Xu, Zhuoer, Yuan, Chunfeng, Huang, Yihua
Many real-world data can be modeled as heterogeneous graphs that contain multiple types of nodes and edges. Meanwhile, due to excellent performance, heterogeneous graph neural networks (GNNs) have received more and more attention. However, the existing work mainly focuses on the design of novel GNN models, while ignoring another important issue that also has a large impact on the model performance, namely the missing attributes of some node types. The handcrafted attribute completion requires huge expert experience and domain knowledge. Also, considering the differences in semantic characteristics between nodes, the attribute completion should be fine-grained, i.e., the attribute completion operation should be node-specific. Moreover, to improve the performance of the downstream graph learning task, attribute completion and the training of the heterogeneous GNN should be jointly optimized rather than viewed as two separate processes. To address the above challenges, we propose a differentiable attribute completion framework called AutoAC for automated completion operation search in heterogeneous GNNs. We first propose an expressive completion operation search space, including topology-dependent and topology-independent completion operations. Then, we propose a continuous relaxation schema and further propose a differentiable completion algorithm where the completion operation search is formulated as a bi-level joint optimization problem. To improve the search efficiency, we leverage two optimization techniques: discrete constraints and auxiliary unsupervised graph node clustering. Extensive experimental results on real-world datasets reveal that AutoAC outperforms the SOTA handcrafted heterogeneous GNNs and the existing attribute completion method
BolT: Fused Window Transformers for fMRI Time Series Analysis
Bedel, Hasan Atakan, Şıvgın, Irmak, Dalmaz, Onat, Dar, Salman Ul Hassan, Çukur, Tolga
Deep-learning models have enabled performance leaps in analysis of high-dimensional functional MRI (fMRI) data. Yet, many previous methods are suboptimally sensitive for contextual representations across diverse time scales. Here, we present BolT, a blood-oxygen-level-dependent transformer model, for analyzing multi-variate fMRI time series. BolT leverages a cascade of transformer encoders equipped with a novel fused window attention mechanism. Encoding is performed on temporally-overlapped windows within the time series to capture local representations. To integrate information temporally, cross-window attention is computed between base tokens in each window and fringe tokens from neighboring windows. To gradually transition from local to global representations, the extent of window overlap and thereby number of fringe tokens are progressively increased across the cascade. Finally, a novel cross-window regularization is employed to align high-level classification features across the time series. Comprehensive experiments on large-scale public datasets demonstrate the superior performance of BolT against state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, explanatory analyses to identify landmark time points and regions that contribute most significantly to model decisions corroborate prominent neuroscientific findings in the literature.
On the Stability and Generalization of Triplet Learning
Chen, Jun, Chen, Hong, Jiang, Xue, Gu, Bin, Li, Weifu, Gong, Tieliang, Zheng, Feng
Triplet learning, i.e. learning from triplet data, has attracted much attention in computer vision tasks with an extremely large number of categories, e.g., face recognition and person re-identification. Albeit with rapid progress in designing and applying triplet learning algorithms, there is a lacking study on the theoretical understanding of their generalization performance. To fill this gap, this paper investigates the generalization guarantees of triplet learning by leveraging the stability analysis. Specifically, we establish the first general high-probability generalization bound for the triplet learning algorithm satisfying the uniform stability, and then obtain the excess risk bounds of the order $O(n^{-\frac{1}{2}} \mathrm{log}n)$ for both stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and regularized risk minimization (RRM), where $2n$ is approximately equal to the number of training samples. Moreover, an optimistic generalization bound in expectation as fast as $O(n^{-1})$ is derived for RRM in a low noise case via the on-average stability analysis. Finally, our results are applied to triplet metric learning to characterize its theoretical underpinning.