On-line decision augmentation (OLDA) has been considered as a promising paradigm for real-time decision making powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI). OLDA has been widely used in many applications such as real-time fraud detection, personalized recommendation, etc. On-line inference puts real-time features extracted from multiple time windows through a pre-trained model to evaluate new data to support decision making. Feature extraction is usually the most time-consuming operation in many OLDA data pipelines. In this work, we started by studying how existing in-memory databases can be leveraged to efficiently support such real-time feature extractions. However, we found that existing in-memory databases cost hundreds or even thousands of milliseconds. This is unacceptable for OLDA applications with strict real-time constraints. We therefore propose FEDB ( F eature E ngineering D ata b ase), a distributed in-memory database system designed to efficiently support on-line feature extraction. Our experimental results show that FEDB can be one to two orders of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art in-memory databases on real-time feature extraction. Furthermore, we explore the use of the Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory Module (PMEM) to make FEDB more cost-effective. When comparing the proposed PMEM-optimized persistent skiplist to the FEDB using DRAM+SSD, PMEM-based FEDB can shorten the tail latency up to 19.7%, reduce the recovery time up to 99.7%, and save up to 58.4% total cost of a real OLDA pipeline.

Tabular data is the most common data format adopted by our customers ranging from retail, finance to E-commerce, and tabular data classification plays an essential role to their businesses. In this paper, we present Network On Network (NON), a practical tabular data classification model based on deep neural network to provide accurate predictions. Various deep methods have been proposed and promising progress has been made. However, most of them use operations like neural network and factorization machines to fuse the embeddings of different features directly, and linearly combine the outputs of those operations to get the final prediction. As a result, the intra-field information and the non-linear interactions between those operations (e.g. neural network and factorization machines) are ignored. Intra-field information is the information that features inside each field belong to the same field. NON is proposed to take full advantage of intra-field information and non-linear interactions. It consists of three components: field-wise network at the bottom to capture the intra-field information, across field network in the middle to choose suitable operations data-drivenly, and operation fusion network on the top to fuse outputs of the chosen operations deeply. Extensive experiments on six real-world datasets demonstrate NON can outperform the state-of-the-art models significantly. Furthermore, both qualitative and quantitative study of the features in the embedding space show NON can capture intra-field information effectively.

We organized a competition on Autonomous Lifelong Machine Learning with Drift that was part of the competition program of NeurIPS 2018. This data driven competition asked participants to develop computer programs capable of solving supervised learning problems where the i.i.d. assumption did not hold. Large data sets were arranged in a lifelong learning and evaluation scenario and CodaLab was used as the challenge platform. The challenge attracted more than 300 participants in its 2 months duration. This chapter describes the design of the challenge and summarizes its main results.

We organized a competition on Autonomous Lifelong Machine Learning with Drift that was part of the competition program of NeurIPS 2018. This data driven competition asked participants to develop computer programs capable of solving supervised learning problems where the i.i.d. assumption did not hold. Large data sets were arranged in a lifelong learning and evaluation scenario and CodaLab was used as the challenge platform. The challenge attracted more than 300 participants in its two month duration. This chapter describes the design of the challenge and summarizes its main results.

Feature crossing captures interactions among categorical features and is useful to enhance learning from tabular data in real-world businesses. In this paper, we present AutoCross, an automatic feature crossing tool provided by 4Paradigm to its customers, ranging from banks, hospitals, to Internet corporations. By performing beam search in a tree-structured space, AutoCross enables efficient generation of high-order cross features, which is not yet visited by existing works. Additionally, we propose successive mini-batch gradient descent and multi-granularity discretization to further improve efficiency and effectiveness, while ensuring simplicity so that no machine learning expertise or tedious hyper-parameter tuning is required. Furthermore, the algorithms are designed to reduce the computational, transmitting, and storage costs involved in distributed computing. Experimental results on both benchmark and real-world business datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of AutoCross. It is shown that AutoCross can significantly enhance the performance of both linear and deep models.

To meet the standard of differential privacy, noise is usually added into the original data, which inevitably deteriorates the predicting performance of subsequent learning algorithms. In this paper, motivated by the success of improving predicting performance by ensemble learning, we propose to enhance privacy-preserving logistic regression by stacking. We show that this can be done either by sample-based or feature-based partitioning. However, we prove that when privacy-budgets are the same, feature-based partitioning requires fewer samples than sample-based one, and thus likely has better empirical performance. As transfer learning is difficult to be integrated with a differential privacy guarantee, we further combine the proposed method with hypothesis transfer learning to address the problem of learning across different organizations. Finally, we not only demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on two benchmark data sets, i.e., MNIST and NEWS20, but also apply it into a real application of cross-organizational diabetes prediction from RUIJIN data set, where privacy is of a significant concern.

Automatic machine learning (AutoML) aims at automatically choosing the best configuration for machine learning tasks. However, a configuration evaluation can be very time consuming particularly on learning tasks with large datasets. This limitation usually restrains derivative-free optimization from releasing its full power for a fine configuration search using many evaluations. To alleviate this limitation, in this paper, we propose a derivative-free optimization framework for AutoML using multi-fidelity evaluations. It uses many low-fidelity evaluations on small data subsets and very few high-fidelity evaluations on the full dataset. However, the low-fidelity evaluations can be badly biased, and need to be corrected with only a very low cost. We thus propose the Transfer Series Expansion (TSE) that learns the low-fidelity correction predictor efficiently by linearly combining a set of base predictors. The base predictors can be obtained cheaply from down-scaled and experienced tasks. Experimental results on real-world AutoML problems verify that the proposed framework can accelerate derivative-free configuration search significantly by making use of the multi-fidelity evaluations.

To meet the standard of differential privacy, noise is usually added into the original data, which inevitably deteriorates the predicting performance of subsequent learning algorithms. In this paper, motivated by the success of improving predicting performance by ensemble learning, we propose to enhance privacy-preserving logistic regression by stacking. We show that this can be done either by sample-based or feature-based partitioning. However, we prove that when privacy-budgets are the same, feature-based partitioning requires fewer samples than sample-based one, and thus likely has better empirical performance. As transfer learning is difficult to be integrated with a differential privacy guarantee, we further combine the proposed method with hypothesis transfer learning to address the problem of learning across different organizations. Finally, we not only demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on two benchmark data sets, i.e., MNIST and NEWS20, but also apply it into a real application of cross-organizational diabetes prediction from RUIJIN data set, where privacy is of significant concern.

To meet the standard of differential privacy, noise is usually added into the original data, which inevitably deteriorates the predicting performance of subsequent learning algorithms. In this paper, motivated by the success of improving predicting performance by ensemble learning, we propose to enhance privacy-preserving logistic regression by stacking. We show that this can be done either by sample-based or feature-based partitioning. However, we prove that when privacy-budgets are the same, feature-based partitioning requires fewer samples than sample-based one, and thus likely has better empirical performance. As transfer learning is difficult to be integrated with a differential privacy guarantee, we further combine the proposed method with hypothesis transfer learning to address the problem of learning across different organizations. Finally, we not only demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on two benchmark data sets, i.e., MNIST and NEWS20, but also apply it into a real application of cross-organizational diabetes prediction from RUIJIN data set, where privacy is of significant concern.

(51) Int. Cl. G06O 30/00 (2006.01) G06N 99/00 (2006.01) H04L 29/08 (2006.01) A user unsubscription prediction method and apparatus includes obtaining service consumption feature data, posi tion activity feature data, and Social network feature data of a user within a first preset time period, where the position activity feature data refers to data related to communication between the user and each base station within the first preset time period, and the social network feature data refers to data related to communication between the user and another user in a social network within the first preset time period, and inputting the obtained service consumption feature data, position activity feature data, and Social network feature data to a pretrained classifier for calculation and outputting a calculation result, where the calculation result is a user unsubscription prediction result.

Telecommunication (telco) operators aim to provide users with optimized services and bandwidth in a timely manner. The goal is to increase user experience while retaining profit. To do this, knowing the changing behavior patterns of users through their activity levels in advance can be a great help for operators to adjust their management strategies and reduce operational risk. To achieve this goal, the operators can make use of knowledge discovered from telco’s historical mobile broadband (MBB) records to predict mobile access activity level at an early stage. In this article, we report our research in a real-world telco setting involving more than one million telco users. Our novel contribution includes representing users as documents containing a collection of changing spatiotemporal “words” that express user behavior. By extracting users’ space-time access records in MBB data, we use latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to learn user-specific compact topic features for user activity level prediction. We propose a scalable online expectation-maximization (OEM) algorithm that can scale LDA to massive MBB data, which is significantly faster than several state-of-the-art online LDA algorithms. Using these real-world MBB data, we confirm high performance in user activity level prediction. In addition, we show that the inferred topics indicate that future activity level anomalies correlate highly with early skewed bandwidth supply and demand relations. Thus, our prediction system can also guide the telco operators to balance the telecommunication network in terms of supply-demand relations, saving deployment costs and energy of cell towers in the future.

It is well known that the key issue of online marketing is to accurately find the target user groups for the corresponding advertisements. Traditionally, the advertising products target user groups based on search keywords (e.g. AdWords), page visiting (e.g. AdSense), and etc. In this work, we explore a new targeting strategy - targeting users based on their downloaded apps. Specifically, we make use of a subset of the data from the Huawei App Store, consisting of 20,169,033 users and 122,875 apps with 453,346,250 downloads during one year. For each marketing job, the advertiser only need to label a small set of apps, usually around 10 apps, that the target users might be interested in. Our system xRank will automatically find a list of top potential target users for the advertiser. We implement xRank with very efficient performance on the top of Hadoop to be capable for a real web-scale dataset, and then conducted our system to several real marketing tasks. The results show that, for each marketing task, with only a few labels, xRank can effectively find a precise target group of users, and can also significantly improved the effectiveness of our online marketing compared to the rule-based approaches in the current system.

Personalized tag recommendation systems recommend a list of tags to a user when he is about to annotate an item. It exploits the individual preference and the characteristic of the items. Tensor factorization tech- niques have been applied to many applications, such as tag recommendation. Models based on Tucker Decomposition can achieve good performance but require a lot of computation power. On the other hand, mod- els based on Canonical Decomposition can run in linear time and are more feasible for online recommendation. In this paper, we propose a novel method for personalized tag recommendation, which can be considered as a nonlinear extension of Canonical Decomposition. Different from linear tensor factorization, we exploit Gaussian radial basis function to increase the model’s capacity. The experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for tag recommendation on real datasets and perform well even with a small number of features, which verifies that our models can make better use of features.