Random Swap
We formulate probabilistic clustering method based on a sequence of random swaps of cluster centroids. We show that the algorithm has linear dependency on the number of data vectors, quadratic on the number of clusters, and inverse dependency on the dimensionality. Each halving of the probability of failure (e.g. from 1% to 0.5%) is achieved at the cost of only linear increase in the processing time.
Efficiency of random swap clustering …

Statistical Disclosure Limitation (SDL)
The Statistical Disclosure Limitation (SDL) problem involves modifying a data set in such a manner that statistical analysis on the modified data is reasonably close to that performed on the original data, while preserving the privacy of individuals in the data set. For instance, we might have a medical data set on which we want to allow researchers to do their statistical analyses but not violate the privacy of the patients in the study. …

RepeatNet
Recurrent neural networks for session-based recommendation have attracted a lot of attention recently because of their promising performance. repeat consumption is a common phenomenon in many recommendation scenarios (e.g., e-commerce, music, and TV program recommendations), where the same item is re-consumed repeatedly over time. However, no previous studies have emphasized repeat consumption with neural networks. An effective neural approach is needed to decide when to perform repeat recommendation. In this paper, we incorporate a repeat-explore mechanism into neural networks and propose a new model, called RepeatNet, with an encoder-decoder structure. RepeatNet integrates a regular neural recommendation approach in the decoder with a new repeat recommendation mechanism that can choose items from a user’s history and recommends them at the right time. We report on extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets. RepeatNet outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on all three datasets in terms of MRR and Recall. Furthermore, as the dataset size and the repeat ratio increase, the improvements of RepeatNet over the baselines also increase, which demonstrates its advantage in handling repeat recommendation scenarios. …

Fused Lasso
Feature selection has been proven a powerful preprocessing step for high-dimensional data analysis. However, most state-of-the-art methods suffer from two major drawbacks. First, they usually overlook the structural correlation information between pairwise samples, which may encapsulate useful information for refining the performance of feature selection. Second, they usually consider candidate feature relevancy equivalent to selected feature relevancy, and some less relevant features may be misinterpreted as salient features. To overcome these issues, we propose a new fused lasso for feature selection using structural information. Our idea is based on converting the original vectorial features into structure-based feature graph representations to incorporate structural relationship between samples, and defining a new evaluation measure to compute the joint significance of pairwise feature combinations in relation to the target feature graph. Furthermore, we formulate the corresponding feature subset selection problem into a least square regression model associated with a fused lasso regularizer to simultaneously maximize the joint relevancy and minimize the redundancy of the selected features. To effectively solve the challenging optimization problem, an iterative algorithm is developed to identify the most discriminative features. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. …