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Intervals have been generated in many applications (e.g., temporal databases), and they are often associated with weights, such as prices. This paper addresses the problem of processing top-k weighted stabbing queries on interval data. Given a set of weighted intervals, a query value, and a result size $k$, this problem finds the $k$ intervals that are stabbed by the query value and have the largest weights. Although this problem finds practical applications (e.g., purchase, vehicle, and cryptocurrency analysis), it has not been well studied. A state-of-the-art algorithm for this problem incurs $O(n\log k)$ time, where $n$ is the number of intervals, so it is not scalable to large $n$. We solve this inefficiency issue and propose an algorithm that runs in $O(\sqrt{n }\log n + k)$ time. Furthermore, we propose an $O(\log n + k)$ algorithm to further accelerate the search efficiency. Experiments on two real large datasets demonstrate that our algorithms are faster than existing algorithms., Comment: Full version of our DEXA2024 paper

In this study, we investigate a new self-supervised learning (SSL) approach for complex work activity recognition using wearable sensors. Owing to the cost of labeled sensor data collection, SSL methods for human activity recognition (HAR) that effectively use unlabeled data for pretraining have attracted attention. However, applying prior SSL to complex work activities such as packaging works is challenging because the observed data vary considerably depending on situations such as the number of items to pack and the size of the items in the case of packaging works. In this study, we focus on sensor data corresponding to characteristic and necessary actions (sensor data motifs) in a specific activity such as a stretching packing tape action in an assembling a box activity, and \textcolor{black}{try} to train a neural network in self-supervised learning so that it identifies occurrences of the characteristic actions, i.e., Motif Identification Learning (MoIL). The feature extractor in the network is used in the downstream task, i.e., work activity recognition, enabling precise activity recognition containing characteristic actions with limited labeled training data. The MoIL approach was evaluated on real-world work activity data and it achieved state-of-the-art performance under limited training labels., Comment: This paper is accepted by PerCom WiP 2024

Order Dependencies (ODs) have many applications, such as query optimization, data integration, and data cleaning. Although many works addressed the problem of discovering OD (and its variants), they do not consider datasets with missing values, a standard observation in real-world datasets. This paper introduces the novel notion of Embedded ODs (eODs) to deal with missing values. The intuition of eODs is to confirm ODs only on tuples with no missing values on a given embedding (a set of attributes). In this paper, we address the problem of validating a given eOD. If the eOD holds, we return true. Otherwise, we search for an updated embedding such that the updated eOD holds. If such embedding does not exist, we return false. A trivial requirement is to consider an embedding such that the number of ignored tuples is minimized. We show that it is NP-complete to compute such embedding. We therefore propose an efficient heuristic algorithm for validating embedded ODs. We conduct experiments on real-world datasets, and the results confirm the efficiency of our algorithm.

Nowadays, many platforms on the Web offer organized events, allowing users to be organizers or participants. For such platforms, it is beneficial to predict potential event participants. Existing work on this problem tends to borrow recommendation techniques. However, compared to e-commerce items and purchases, events and participation are usually of a much smaller frequency, and the data may be insufficient to learn an accurate model. In this paper, we propose to utilize social media retweeting activity data to enhance the learning of event participant prediction models. We create a joint knowledge graph to bridge the social media and the target domain, assuming that event descriptions and tweets are written in the same language. Furthermore, we propose a learning model that utilizes retweeting information for the target domain prediction more effectively. We conduct comprehensive experiments in two scenarios with real-world data. In each scenario, we set up training data of different sizes, as well as warm and cold test cases. The evaluation results show that our approach consistently outperforms several baseline models, especially with the warm test cases, and when target domain data is limited., Comment: Accepted in WI-IAT 2023

Wearable sensor devices, which offer the advantage of recording daily objects used by a person while performing an activity, enable the feasibility of unsupervised Human Activity Recognition (HAR). Unfortunately, previous unsupervised approaches using the usage sequence of objects usually require a proper description of activities manually prepared by humans. Instead, we leverage the knowledge embedded in a Large Language Model (LLM) of ChatGPT. Because the sequence of objects robustly characterizes the activity identity, it is possible that ChatGPT already learned the association between activities and objects from existing contexts. However, previous prompt engineering for ChatGPT exhibits limited generalization ability when dealing with a list of words (i.e., sequence of objects) due to the similar weighting assigned to each word in the list. In this study, we propose a two-stage prompt engineering, which first guides ChatGPT to generate activity descriptions associated with objects while emphasizing important objects for distinguishing similar activities; then outputs activity classes and explanations for enhancing the contexts that are helpful for HAR. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that utilizes ChatGPT to recognize activities using objects in an unsupervised manner. We conducted our approach on three datasets and demonstrated the state-of-the-art performance., Comment: 4 pages

Unlike human daily activities, existing publicly available sensor datasets for work activity recognition in industrial domains are limited by difficulties in collecting realistic data as close collaboration with industrial sites is required. This also limits research on and development of methods for industrial applications. To address these challenges and contribute to research on machine recognition of work activities in industrial domains, in this study, we introduce a new large-scale dataset for packaging work recognition called OpenPack. OpenPack contains 53.8 hours of multimodal sensor data, including acceleration data, keypoints, depth images, and readings from IoT-enabled devices (e.g., handheld barcode scanners), collected from 16 distinct subjects with different levels of packaging work experience. We apply state-of-the-art human activity recognition techniques to the dataset and provide future directions of complex work activity recognition studies in the pervasive computing community based on the results. We believe that OpenPack will contribute to the sensor-based action/activity recognition community by providing challenging tasks. The OpenPack dataset is available at https://open-pack.github.io.

Deep learning-based recommender systems may lead to over-fitting when lacking training interaction data. This over-fitting significantly degrades recommendation performances. To address this data sparsity problem, cross-domain recommender systems (CDRSs) exploit the data from an auxiliary source domain to facilitate the recommendation on the sparse target domain. Most existing CDRSs rely on overlapping users or items to connect domains and transfer knowledge. However, matching users is an arduous task and may involve privacy issues when data comes from different companies, resulting in a limited application for the above CDRSs. Some studies develop CDRSs that require no overlapping users and items by transferring learned user interaction patterns. However, they ignore the bias in user interaction patterns between domains and hence suffer from an inferior performance compared with single-domain recommender systems. In this paper, based on the above findings, we propose a novel CDRS, namely semantic clustering enhanced debiasing graph neural recommender system (SCDGN), that requires no overlapping users and items and can handle the domain bias. More precisely, SCDGN semantically clusters items from both domains and constructs a cross-domain bipartite graph generated from item clusters and users. Then, the knowledge is transferred via this cross-domain user-cluster graph from the source to the target. Furthermore, we design a debiasing graph convolutional layer for SCDGN to extract unbiased structural knowledge from the cross-domain user-cluster graph. Our Experimental results on three public datasets and a pair of proprietary datasets verify the effectiveness of SCDGN over state-of-the-art models in terms of cross-domain recommendations., Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures

Big data mining is well known to be an important task for data science, because it can provide useful observations and new knowledge hidden in given large datasets. Proximity-based data analysis is particularly utilized in many real-life applications. In such analysis, the distances to k nearest neighbors are usually employed, thus its main bottleneck is derived from data retrieval. Much efforts have been made to improve the efficiency of these analyses. However, they still incur large costs, because they essentially need many data accesses. To avoid this issue, we propose a machine-learning technique that quickly and accurately estimates the k-NN distances (i.e., distances to the k nearest neighbors) of a given query. We train a fully connected neural network model and utilize pivots to achieve accurate estimation. Our model is designed to have useful advantages: it infers distances to the k-NNs at a time, its inference time is O(1) (no data accesses are incurred), but it keeps high accuracy. Our experimental results and case studies on real datasets demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our solution., Comment: Accepted to SIGSPATIAL2022 (as short paper)

Clustering multi-dimensional points is a fundamental task in many fields, and density-based clustering supports many applications as it can discover clusters of arbitrary shapes. This paper addresses the problem of Density-Peaks Clustering (DPC), a recently proposed density-based clustering framework. Although DPC already has many applications, its straightforward implementation incurs a quadratic time computation to the number of points in a given dataset, thereby does not scale to large datasets. To enable DPC on large datasets, we propose efficient algorithms for DPC. Specifically, we propose an exact algorithm, Ex-DPC, and two approximation algorithms, Approx-DPC and S-Approx-DPC. Under a reasonable assumption about a DPC parameter, our algorithms are sub-quadratic, i.e., break the quadratic barrier. Besides, Approx-DPC does not require any additional parameters and can return the same cluster centers as those of Ex-DPC, rendering an accurate clustering result. S-Approx-DPC requires an approximation parameter but can speed up its computational efficiency. We further present that their efficiencies can be accelerated by leveraging multicore processing. We conduct extensive experiments using synthetic and real datasets, and our experimental results demonstrate that our algorithms are efficient, scalable, and accurate., Comment: This is a corrected version of our SIGMOD2021 paper

Distance-based outlier detection is widely adopted in many fields, e.g., data mining and machine learning, because it is unsupervised, can be employed in a generic metric space, and does not have any assumptions of data distributions. Data mining and machine learning applications face a challenge of dealing with large datasets, which requires efficient distance-based outlier detection algorithms. Due to the popularization of computational environments with large memory, it is possible to build a main-memory index and detect outliers based on it, which is a promising solution for fast distance-based outlier detection. Motivated by this observation, we propose a novel approach that exploits a proximity graph. Our approach can employ an arbitrary proximity graph and obtains a significant speed-up against state-of-the-art. However, designing an effective proximity graph raises a challenge, because existing proximity graphs do not consider efficient traversal for distance-based outlier detection. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel proximity graph, MRPG. Our empirical study using real datasets demonstrates that MRPG detects outliers significantly faster than the state-of-the-art algorithms., Comment: Accepted to SIGMOD2021

The MIPS (maximum inner product search), which finds the item with the highest inner product with a given query user, is an essential problem in the recommendation field. It is usual that e-commerce companies face situations where they want to promote and sell new or discounted items. In these situations, we have to consider a question: who are interested in the items and how to find them? This paper answers this question by addressing a new problem called reverse maximum inner product search (reverse MIPS). Given a query vector and two sets of vectors (user vectors and item vectors), the problem of reverse MIPS finds a set of user vectors whose inner product with the query vector is the maximum among the query and item vectors. Although the importance of this problem is clear, its straightforward implementation incurs a computationally expensive cost. We therefore propose Simpfer, a simple, fast, and exact algorithm for reverse MIPS. In an offline phase, Simpfer builds a simple index that maintains a lower-bound of the maximum inner product. By exploiting this index, Simpfer judges whether the query vector can have the maximum inner product or not, for a given user vector, in a constant time. Besides, our index enables filtering user vectors, which cannot have the maximum inner product with the query vector, in a batch. We theoretically demonstrate that Simpfer outperforms baselines employing state-of-the-art MIPS techniques. Furthermore, our extensive experiments on real datasets show that Simpfer is at least two orders magnitude faster than the baselines., Comment: Accepted to RecSys2021

In recommender systems, a cold-start problem occurs when there is no past interaction record associated with the user or item. Typical solutions to the cold-start problem make use of contextual information, such as user demographic attributes or product descriptions. A group of works have shown that social media background can help predicting temporal phenomenons such as product sales and stock price movements. In this work, our goal is to investigate whether social media background can be used as extra contextual information to improve recommendation models. Based on an existing deep neural network model, we proposed a method to represent temporal social media background as embeddings and fuse them as an extra component in the model. We conduct experimental evaluations on a real-world e-commerce dataset and a Twitter dataset. The results show that our method of fusing social media background with the existing model does generally improve recommendation performance. In some cases the recommendation accuracy measured by hit-rate@K doubles after fusing with social media background. Our findings can be beneficial for future recommender system designs that consider complex temporal information representing social interests., Comment: Accepted for presentation in IJCNN 2021

Event detection on social media has attracted a number of researches, given the recent availability of large volumes of social media discussions. Previous works on social media event detection either assume a specific type of event, or assume certain behavior of observed variables. In this paper, we propose a general method for event detection on social media that makes few assumptions. The main assumption we make is that when an event occurs, affected semantic aspects will behave differently from its usual behavior. We generalize the representation of time units based on word embeddings of social media text, and propose an algorithm to detect events in time series in a general sense. In the experimental evaluation, we use a novel setting to test if our method and baseline methods can exhaustively catch all real-world news in the test period. The evaluation results show that when the event is quite unusual with regard to the base social media discussion, it can be captured more effectively with our method. Our method can be easily implemented and can be treated as a starting point for more specific applications., Comment: Accepted for presentation in the 25th European Conference on Advances in Databases and Information Systems (ADBIS 2021)

Recent applications employ publish/subscribe (Pub/Sub) systems so that publishers can easily receive attentions of customers and subscribers can monitor useful information generated by publishers. Due to the prevalence of smart devices and social networking services, a large number of objects that contain both spatial and keyword information have been generated continuously, and the number of subscribers also continues to increase. This poses a challenge to Pub/Sub systems: they need to continuously extract useful information from massive objects for each subscriber in real time. In this paper, we address the problem of k nearest neighbor monitoring on a spatial-keyword data stream for a large number of subscriptions. To scale well to massive objects and subscriptions, we propose a distributed solution, namely DkM-SKS. Given m workers, DkM-SKS divides a set of subscriptions into m disjoint subsets based on a cost model so that each worker has almost the same kNN-update cost, to maintain load balancing. DkM-SKS allows an arbitrary approach to updating kNN of each subscription, so with a suitable in-memory index, DkM-SKS can accelerate update efficiency by pruning irrelevant subscriptions for a given new object. We conduct experiments on real datasets, and the results demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of DkM-SKS., Comment: 10 pages