Oguzhan Karaahmetoglu

Oguzhan Karaahmetoglu, Suleyman S. Kozat

We study the spatio-temporal prediction problem and introduce a novel point-process-based prediction algorithm. Spatio-temporal prediction is extensively studied in Machine Learning literature due to its critical real-life applications such as crime, earthquake, and social event prediction. Despite these thorough studies, specific problems inherent to the application domain are not yet fully explored. Here, we address the non-stationary spatio-temporal prediction problem on both densely and sparsely distributed sequences. We introduce a probabilistic approach that partitions the spatial domain into subregions and models the event arrivals in each region with interacting point-processes. Our algorithm can jointly learn the spatial partitioning and the interaction between these regions through a gradient-based optimization procedure. Finally, we demonstrate the performance of our algorithm on both simulated data and two real-life datasets. We compare our approach with baseline and state-of-the-art deep learning-based approaches, where we achieve significant performance improvements. Moreover, we also show the effect of using different parameters on the overall performance through empirical results and explain the procedure for choosing the parameters.

Fatih Ilhan, Oguzhan Karaahmetoglu, Ismail Balaban et al.

We investigate nonlinear regression for nonstationary sequential data. In most real-life applications such as business domains including finance, retail, energy and economy, timeseries data exhibits nonstationarity due to the temporally varying dynamics of the underlying system. We introduce a novel recurrent neural network (RNN) architecture, which adaptively switches between internal regimes in a Markovian way to model the nonstationary nature of the given data. Our model, Markovian RNN employs a hidden Markov model (HMM) for regime transitions, where each regime controls hidden state transitions of the recurrent cell independently. We jointly optimize the whole network in an end-to-end fashion. We demonstrate the significant performance gains compared to vanilla RNN and conventional methods such as Markov Switching ARIMA through an extensive set of experiments with synthetic and real-life datasets. We also interpret the inferred parameters and regime belief values to analyze the underlying dynamics of the given sequences.

Oguzhan Karaahmetoglu, Fatih Ilhan, Ismail Balaban et al.

We study anomaly detection and introduce an algorithm that processes variable length, irregularly sampled sequences or sequences with missing values. Our algorithm is fully unsupervised, however, can be readily extended to supervised or semisupervised cases when the anomaly labels are present as remarked throughout the paper. Our approach uses the Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks in order to extract temporal features and find the most relevant feature vectors for anomaly detection. We incorporate the sampling time information to our model by modulating the standard LSTM model with time modulation gates. After obtaining the most relevant features from the LSTM, we label the sequences using a Support Vector Data Descriptor (SVDD) model. We introduce a loss function and then jointly optimize the feature extraction and sequence processing mechanisms in an end-to-end manner. Through this joint optimization, the LSTM extracts the most relevant features for anomaly detection later to be used in the SVDD, hence completely removes the need for feature selection by expert knowledge. Furthermore, we provide a training algorithm for the online setup, where we optimize our model parameters with individual sequences as the new data arrives. Finally, on real-life datasets, we show that our model significantly outperforms the standard approaches thanks to its combination of LSTM with SVDD and joint optimization.

Oguzhan Karaahmetoglu, Suleyman Serdar Kozat

We study the spatio-temporal prediction problem, which has attracted the attention of many researchers due to its critical real-life applications. In particular, we introduce a novel approach to this problem. Our approach is based on the Hawkes process, which is a non-stationary and self-exciting point process. We extend the formulations of a standard point process model that can represent time-series data to represent a spatio-temporal data. We model the data as nonstationary in time and space. Furthermore, we partition the spatial region we are working on into subregions via an adaptive decision tree and model the source statistics in each subregion with individual but mutually interacting point processes. We also provide a gradient based joint optimization algorithm for the point process and decision tree parameters. Thus, we introduce a model that can jointly infer the source statistics and an adaptive partitioning of the spatial region. Finally, we provide experimental results on real-life data, which provides significant improvement due to space adaptation and joint optimization compared to standard well-known methods in the literature.