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Business to Business (B2B) marketing aims at meeting the needs of other businesses instead of individual consumers, and thus entails management of more complex business needs than consumer marketing. The buying processes of the business customers involve series of different marketing campaigns providing multifaceted information about the products or services. While most existing studies focus on individual consumers, little has been done to guide business customers due to the dynamic and complex nature of these business buying processes. To this end, in this paper, we focus on providing a unified view of social and temporal modeling for B2B marketing campaign recommendation. Along this line, we first exploit the temporal behavior patterns in the B2B buying processes and develop a marketing campaign recommender system. Specifically, we start with constructing a temporal graph as the knowledge representation of the buying process of each business customer. Temporal graph can effectively extract and integrate the campaign order preferences of individual business customers. It is also worth noting that our system is backward compatible since the participating frequency used in conventional static recommender systems is naturally embedded in our temporal graph. The campaign recommender is then built in a low-rank graph reconstruction framework based on probabilistic graphical models. Our framework can identify the common graph patterns and predict missing edges in the temporal graphs. In addition, since business customers very often have different decision makers from the same company, we also incorporate social factors, such as community relationships of the business customers, for further improving overall performances of the missing edge prediction and recommendation. Finally, we have performed extensive empirical studies on real-world B2B marketing data sets and the results show that the proposed method can effectively improve the quality of the campaign recommendations for challenging B2B marketing tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Learning appropriate metric is critical for effectively capturing complex data characteristics. The metric learning of categorical data with hierarchical coupling relationships and local heterogeneous distributions is very challenging yet rarely explored. This paper proposes a Heterogeneous mEtric Learning with hIerarchical Couplings (HELIC for short) for this type of categorical data. HELIC captures both low-level value-to-attribute and high-level attribute-to-class hierarchical couplings, and reveals the intrinsic heterogeneities embedded in each level of couplings. Theoretical analyses of the effectiveness and generalization error bound verify that HELIC effectively represents the above complexities. Extensive experiments on 30 data sets with diverse characteristics demonstrate that HELIC-enabled classification significantly enhances the accuracy (up to 40.93 percent), compared with five state-of-the-art baselines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semantic drift is a common problem in iterative information extraction. Previous approaches for minimizing semantic drift may incur substantial loss in recall. We observe that most semantic drifts are introduced by a small number of questionable extractions in the earlier rounds of iterations. These extractions subsequently introduce a large number of questionable results, which lead to the semantic drift phenomenon. We call these questionable extractions Drifting Points (DPs). If erroneous extractions are the “symptoms” of semantic drift, then DPs are the “causes” of semantic drift. In this paper, we propose a method to minimize semantic drift by identifying the DPs and removing the effect introduced by the DPs. We use isA (concept-instance) extraction as an example to describe our approach in cleaning information extraction errors caused by semantic drift, but we perform experiments on different relation extraction processes on three large real data extraction collections. The experimental results show that our DP cleaning method enables us to clean around 90 percent incorrect instances or patterns with about 90 percent precision, which outperforms the previous approaches we compare with. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Dimensionality reduction is an essential pre-processing technique in many of the data analysis tasks. Popular approaches for dimensionality reduction are Feature Selection (FS) and Feature Extraction (FE). Till now, these approaches are often studied separately or independently so that the final result contains either original or transformed features. In our work, we propose to bridge these two approaches with the aim of finding reduced feature set to contain both kinds (original as well as transformed) of features. A new framework, called Minimum Projection error Minimum Redundancy (MPeMR), is introduced to obtain this result while maintaining orthogonality property among selected original and linear combinations of features. A unified iterative algorithm, for both supervised and unsupervised cases, is also developed under this framework. For each case, the performance of the proposed algorithm is successfully compared with the state-of-the-art methods on real-life data sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]