Community detection is a fundamental and widely-studied problem that finds all densely-connected groups of nodes and well separates them from others in graphs. With the proliferation of rich information available for entities in real-world networks, it is useful to discover communities in attributed graphs where nodes tend to have attributes. However, most existing attributed community detection methods directly utilize the original network topology leading to poor results due to ignoring inherent community structures. In this paper, we propose a novel embedding based model to discover communities in attributed graphs. Specifically, based on the observation of densely-connected structures in communities, we develop a novel community structure embedding method to encode inherent community structures via underlying community memberships. Based on node attributes and community structure embedding, we formulate the attributed community detection as a nonnegative matrix factorization optimization problem. Moreover, we carefully design iterative updating rules to make sure of finding a converging solution. Extensive experiments conducted on 19 attributed graph datasets with overlapping and non-overlapping ground-truth communities show that our proposed model CDE can accurately identify attributed communities and significantly outperform 7 state-of-the-art methods.

Badges are a common, and sometimes the only, method of incentivizing users to perform certain actions on on- line sites. However, due to many competing factors influencing user temporal dynamics, it is difficult to determine whether the badge had (or will have) the intended effect or not. In this paper, we introduce two complementary approaches for determining badge influence on users. In the first one, we cluster users’ temporal traces (represented with Poisson processes) and apply covariates (user features) to regularize results. In the second approach, we first classify users’ temporal traces with a novel statistical framework, and then we refine the classification results with a semi-supervised clustering of covariates. Outcomes obtained from an evaluation on synthetic datasets and experiments on two badges from a pop- ular Q&A platform confirm that it is possible to validate, characterize and to some extent predict users affected by the badge.

In the past decade, various multi-view outlier detection methods have been designed to detect horizontal outliers that exhibit inconsistent across-view characteristics. The existing works assume that all objects are present in all views. However, in real-world applications, it is often the incomplete case that every view may suffer from some missing samples, resulting in partial objects difficult to detect outliers from. To address this problem, we propose a novel Collective Learning (CL) based framework to detect outliers from partial multi-view data in a self-guided way. More specifically, by well exploiting the inter-dependence among different views, we develop an algorithm to reconstruct missing samples based on learning. Furthermore, we propose similarity-based outlier detection to break through the dilemma that the number of clusters is unknown priori. Then, the calculated outlier scores act as the confidence levels in CL and in turn guide the reconstruction of missing data. Learning-based missing sample recovery and similarity-based outlier detection are iteratively performed in a self-guided manner. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that our proposed approach consistently and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

Jointing visual-semantic embeddings (VSE) have become a research hotpot for the task of image annotation, which suffers from the issue of semantic gap, i.e., the gap between images' visual features (low-level) and labels' semantic features (high-level). This issue will be even more challenging if visual features cannot be retrieved from images, that is, when images are only denoted by numerical IDs as given in some real datasets. The typical way of existing VSE methods is to perform a uniform sampling method for negative examples that violate the ranking order against positive examples, which requires a time-consuming search in the whole label space. In this paper, we propose a fast adaptive negative sampler that can work well in the settings of no figure pixels available. Our sampling strategy is to choose the negative examples that are most likely to meet the requirements of violation according to the latent factors of images. In this way, our approach can linearly scale up to large datasets. The experiments demonstrate that our approach converges 5.02x faster than the state-of-the-art approaches on OpenImages, 2.5x on IAPR-TCI2 and 2.06x on NUS-WIDE datasets, as well as better ranking accuracy across datasets.

Network embedding aims to learn the low-dimensional representations of vertexes in a network, while structure and inherent properties of the network is preserved. Existing network embedding works primarily focus on preserving the microscopic structure, such as the first- and second-order proximity of vertexes, while the macroscopic scale-free property is largely ignored. Scale-free property depicts the fact that vertex degrees follow a heavy-tailed distribution (i.e., only a few vertexes have high degrees) and is a critical property of real-world networks, such as social networks. In this paper, we study the problem of learning representations for scale-free networks. We first theoretically analyze the difficulty of embedding and reconstructing a scale-free network in the Euclidean space, by converting our problem to the sphere packing problem. Then, we propose the "degree penalty" principle for designing scale-free property preserving network embedding algorithm: punishing the proximity between high-degree vertexes. We introduce two implementations of our principle by utilizing the spectral techniques and a skip-gram model respectively. Extensive experiments on six datasets show that our algorithms are able to not only reconstruct heavy-tailed distributed degree distribution, but also outperform state-of-the-art embedding models in various network mining tasks, such as vertex classification and link prediction.

Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is a popular approach in various network applications, such as link prediction and network parameter characterization. Incremental SVD approaches are proposed to process newly changed nodes and edges in dynamic networks. However, incremental SVD approaches suffer from serious error accumulation inevitably due to approximation on incremental updates. SVD restart is an effective approach to reset the aggregated error, but when to restart SVD for dynamic networks is not addressed in literature. In this paper, we propose TIMERS, Theoretically Instructed Maximum-Error-bounded Restart of SVD, a novel approach which optimally sets the restart time in order to reduce error accumulation in time. Specifically, we monitor the margin between reconstruction loss of incremental updates and the minimum loss in SVD model. To reduce the complexity of monitoring, we theoretically develop a lower bound of SVD minimum loss for dynamic networks and use the bound to replace the minimum loss in monitoring. By setting a maximum tolerated error as a threshold, we can trigger SVD restart automatically when the margin exceeds this threshold. We prove that the time complexity of our method is linear with respect to the number of local dynamic changes, and our method is general across different types of dynamic networks. We conduct extensive experiments on several synthetic and real dynamic networks. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms the existing methods by reducing 27% to 42% in terms of the maximum error for dynamic network reconstruction when fixing the number of restarts. Our method reduces the number of restarts by 25% to 50% when fixing the maximum error tolerated.

The availability of a large amount of electronic health records (EHR) provides huge opportunities to improve health care service by mining these data. One important application is clinical endpoint prediction, which aims to predict whether a disease, a symptom or an abnormal lab test will happen in the future according to patients' history records. This paper develops deep learning techniques for clinical endpoint prediction, which are effective in many practical applications. However, the problem is very challenging since patients' history records contain multiple heterogeneous temporal events such as lab tests, diagnosis, and drug administrations. The visiting patterns of different types of events vary significantly, and there exist complex nonlinear relationships between different events. In this paper, we propose a novel model for learning the joint representation of heterogeneous temporal events. The model adds a new gate to control the visiting rates of different events which effectively models the irregular patterns of different events and their nonlinear correlations. Experiment results with real-world clinical data on the tasks of predicting death and abnormal lab tests prove the effectiveness of our proposed approach over competitive baselines.

Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is a chronic disease that usually results in multiple complications. Early identification of individuals at risk for complications after being diagnosed with T2DM is of significant clinical value. In this paper, we present a new data-driven predictive approach to predict when a patient will develop complications after the initial T2DM diagnosis. We propose a novel survival analysis method to model the time-to-event of T2DM complications designed to simultaneously achieve two important metrics: 1) accurate prediction of event times, and 2) good ranking of the relative risks of two patients. Moreover, to better capture the correlations of time-to-events of the multiple complications, we further develop a multi-task version of the survival model. To assess the performance of these approaches, we perform extensive experiments on patient level data extracted from a large electronic health record claims database. The results show that our new proposed survival analysis approach consistently outperforms traditional survival models and demonstrate the effectiveness of the multi-task framework over modeling each complication independently.

Embedding high-dimensional visual features (d-dimensional) to binary codes (b-dimensional) has shown advantages in various vision tasks such as object recognition and image retrieval. Meanwhile, recent works have demonstrated that to fully utilize the representation power of high-dimensional features, it is critical to encode them into long binary codes rather than short ones, i.e., b ~ O(d). However, generating long binary codes involves large projection matrix and high-dimensional matrix-vector multiplication, thus is memory and computationally intensive. To tackle these problems, we propose Tensorized Projection (TP) to decompose the projection matrix using Tensor-Train (TT) format, which is a chain-like representation that allows to operate tensor in an efficient manner. As a result, TP can drastically reduce the computational complexity and memory cost. Moreover, by using the TT-format, TP can regulate the projection matrix against the risk of over-fitting, consequently, lead to better performance than using either dense projection matrix (like ITQ) or sparse projection matrix. Experimental comparisons with state-of-the-art methods over various visual tasks demonstrate both the efficiency and performance ad- vantages of our proposed TP, especially when generating high dimensional binary codes, e.g., when b ≥ d.

Approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search is a fundamental problem in computer vision, machine learning and information retrieval. Recently, quantization-based methods have drawn a lot of attention due to their superior accuracy and comparable efficiency compared with traditional hashing techniques. However, despite the prosperity of quantization techniques, they are all designed for the centralized setting, i.e., quantization is performed on the data on a single machine. This makes it difficult to scale these techniques to large-scale datasets. Built upon the Composite Quantization, we propose a novel quantization algorithm for data dis- tributed across different nodes of an arbitrary network. The proposed Distributed Composite Quantization (DCQ) decom-poses Composite Quantization into a set of decentralized sub-problems such that each node solves its own sub-problem on its local data, meanwhile is still able to attain consistent quantizers thanks to the consensus constraint. Since there is no exchange of training data across the nodes in the learning process, the communication cost of our method is low. Ex- tensive experiments on ANN search and image retrieval tasks validate that the proposed DCQ significantly improves Composite Quantization in both efficiency and scale, while still maintaining competitive accuracy.