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This paper introduces a min-max optimization formulation for the Graph Signal Denoising (GSD) problem. In this formulation, we first maximize the second term of GSD by introducing perturbations to the graph structure based on Laplacian distance and then minimize the overall loss of the GSD. By solving the min-max optimization problem, we derive a new variant of the Graph Diffusion Convolution (GDC) architecture, called Graph Adversarial Diffusion Convolution (GADC). GADC differs from GDC by incorporateing an additional term that enhances robustness against adversarial attacks on the graph structure and noise in node features. Moreover, GADC improves the performance of GDC on heterophilic graphs. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of GADC across various datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/SongtaoLiu0823/GADC. 

This paper introduces a min-max optimization formulation for the Graph Signal Denoising (GSD) problem. In this formulation, we first maximize the second term of GSD by introducing perturbations to the graph structure based on Laplacian distance and then minimize the overall loss of the GSD. By solving the min-max optimization problem, we derive a new variant of the Graph Diffusion Convolution (GDC) architecture, called Graph Adversarial Diffusion Convolution (GADC). GADC differs from GDC by incorporating an additional term that enhances robustness against adversarial attacks on the graph structure and noise in node features. Moreover, GADC improves the performance of GDC on heterophilic graphs. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of GADC across various datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/SongtaoLiu0823/GADC. 

There has been growing research interest in developing methodology to evaluate healthcare centers' performance with respect to patient outcomes. Conventional assessments can be conducted using fixed or random effects models, as seen in provider profiling. We propose a new method, using fusion penalty to cluster healthcare centers with respect to a survival outcome. Without any prior knowledge of the grouping information, the new method provides a desirable data‐driven approach for automatically clustering healthcare centers into distinct groups based on their performance. An efficient alternating direction method of multipliers algorithm is developed to implement the proposed method. The validity of our approach is demonstrated through simulation studies, and its practical application is illustrated by analyzing data from the national kidney transplant registry. 

Graph embedding techniques are pivotal in real-world machine learning tasks that operate on graph-structured data, such as social recommendation and protein structure modeling. Embeddings are mostly performed on the node level for learning representations of each node. Since the formation of a graph is inevitably affected by certain sensitive node attributes, the node embeddings can inherit such sensitive information and introduce undesirable biases in downstream tasks. Most existing works impose ad-hoc constraints on the node embeddings to restrict their distributions for unbiasedness/fairness, which however compromise the utility of the resulting embeddings. In this paper, we propose a principled new way for unbiased graph embedding by learning node embeddings from an underlying bias-free graph, which is not influenced by sensitive node attributes. Motivated by this new perspective, we propose two complementary methods for uncovering such an underlying graph, with the goal of introducing minimum impact on the utility of the embeddings. Both our theoretical justification and extensive experimental comparisons against state-of-the-art solutions demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods. 

User representation learning is vital to capture diverse user preferences, while it is also challenging as user intents are latent and scattered among complex and different modalities of user-generated data, thus, not directly measurable. Inspired by the concept of user schema in social psychology, we take a new perspective to perform user representation learning by constructing a shared latent space to capture the dependency among different modalities of user-generated data. Both users and topics are embedded to the same space to encode users' social connections and text content, to facilitate joint modeling of different modalities, via a probabilistic generative framework. We evaluated the proposed solution on large collections of Yelp reviews and StackOverflow discussion posts, with their associated network structures. The proposed model outperformed several state-of-the-art topic modeling based user models with better predictive power in unseen documents, and state-of-the-art network embedding based user models with improved link prediction quality in unseen nodes. The learnt user representations are also proved to be useful in content recommendation, e.g., expert finding in StackOverflow. 

Modern buildings are instrumented with thousands of sensing and control points. The ability to automatically extract the physical context of each point, e.g., the type, location, and relationship with other points, is the key to enabling building analytics at scale. However, this process is costly as it usually requires domain expertise with a deep understanding of the building system and its point naming scheme. In this study, we aim to reduce the human effort required for mapping sensors to their context, i.e., metadata mapping. We formulate the problem as a sequential labeling process and use the conditional random field to exploit the regular and dependent structures observed in the metadata. We develop a suite of active learning strategies to adaptively select the most informative subsequences in point names for human labeling, which significantly reduces the inputs from domain experts. We evaluated our approach on three different buildings and observed encouraging performance in metadata mapping from the proposed solution. 

A user-generated review document is a product between the item's intrinsic properties and the user's perceived composition of those properties. Without properly modeling and decoupling these two factors, one can hardly obtain any accurate user understanding nor item profiling from such user-generated data. In this paper, we study a new text mining problem that aims at differentiating a user's subjective composition of topical content in his/her review document from the entity's intrinsic properties. Motivated by the Item Response Theory (IRT), we model each review document as a user's detailed response to an item, and assume the response is jointly determined by the individuality of the user and the property of the item. We model the text-based response with a generative topic model, in which we characterize the items' properties and users' manifestations of them in a low-dimensional topic space. Via posterior inference, we separate and study these two components over a collection of review documents. Extensive experiments on two large collections of Amazon and Yelp review data verified the effectiveness of the proposed solution: it outperforms the state-of-art topic models with better predictive power in unseen documents, which is directly translated into improved performance in item recommendation and item summarization tasks.